3 essential carry-on items

1. TSA-Approved Multi-tool

You never know when a screw driver or little pry bar will be useful. Whether it's doing quick fixes to your luggage or clothes or simply being prepared to open a nice cold beer, it's always nice to be prepared especially when traveling far from your home. Due to security restrictions on flights, the types of tools that you can bring that are small and useful, but still safe is a little limited. My current favorite is the Gerber Shard. This tool is tiny and can easily fit in a pocket or on a key chain. The small size, however, is deceptive. This little tool has seven convenient functions: small/medium flat drivers, cross driver, pry bar, wire stripper, lanyard hole, and bottle opener and I have been able to successfully travel internationally with it multiple times

2. Pocket Notebook

Although mobile phones handle most of the tasks that a notebook used to these days, we have always found a few handy uses for a simple and small notebook during all of our trips. Whether its for making a to-do list of places we want to visit in a new city, writing down directions or suggestions provided by locals, sketching out maps, or just having the option to write something down and tear a sheet out to to give to someone, having a notebook has been a really nice convenience. In addition, it is nice to be able to use a notebook to reduce the amount of times you have to pull out your phone in crowded areas were pickpockets may be watching. Any notebook that can fit in a pocket can work, but I really like the ones from Field Notes . The look and size of the notebooks are perfect and it's really cool that they have graph paper as opposed to lined or blank pages. 

3. Pen

I can't count the number of times having a pen in our pockets has made our life so much easier. Whether it's filling out customs and immigration forms or filling in your contact information on a luggage tag, there is always a need for a pen and more often than not there will only be one pen so many people will have to share, or you may have to go rifling through a large backpack or carry-on thats somewhere inconvenient to find something to write with. At the moment, the best solution that I have found is the Fisher Bullet Space Pen. This thing is awesome! It is so tiny you can barely tell it is in your pocket, but when you open it and attach the cap it turns into a full size pen! In addition to the cool design, the pen is super reliable in all situations and will eliminate the extreme frustration that comes with having to shake a cheap plastic pen to get the ink to start flowing. 

What are some of your favorite carry-on items?