Europe Summer

Here is the thing every packing guide online gets wrong about Europe: it assumes you live in the northern hemisphere.

An Australian summer trip to Europe departs in our winter. You pack in Melbourne in May, in a jumper, for six weeks of thirty-five degrees. Everything about the shopping, the packing and the mental model is inverted, and no guide written in Ohio helps with that.

Air conditioning is not a given

Not in hotels, not in apartments, not on trains, and often not in expensive ones. Southern Europe has passed 45°C in recent summers and most of the building stock predates the idea of cooling by several centuries.

Assume you will not have aircon and pack accordingly. That is the single biggest difference between a good European summer and a miserable one.

The sink plug is not a joke

European hotel and apartment sinks are, with remarkable consistency, missing their plugs. A flat silicone disc costs less than one launderette load and makes hand washing possible for six weeks.

Pickpocketing is a bag-design problem

Paris, Rome and Barcelona are not dangerous. They are places where a distracted tourist with an open tote is a reasonable target. Zips that face your body solve almost all of it, and no amount of vigilance solves it as well.