As long term travellers we experienced what it means to get back from a tropical climate to a pretty harsh one last winter. It’s foolish to carry warm clothes with you for months in summer climates, but what should you do then. It would be hard on your budget to buy everything you need on your destination and not good for the environment either, so we tried to find alternatives to that.
1. Choose the Right Destination
First of all, try to choose destination where you have a friend or even better – relative. We’ve chosen UK as our first destination when we were coming back from SE Asia and the reason was my sister and her partner lived there. That meant we both will get some clothes and Justinas even shoes! My feet are too big to wear my sister’s shoes.
English winter isn’t bad at all, it gets cold only when you come back from a tropical destination
If you have any type of sneakers you should be fine on English winter, but one of our luggages didn’t arrive where I had all my warmer clothes.
Yup, this works too
So the only option I had was to wear sandals with super warm socks and that helped. Luckily it didn’t rain!
Sandals are perfect for almost all climates except from winter, that makes them 75% useful on your trip.
We were glad to borrow as many clothes as we needed. While we didn’t had any coats, their wardrobe helped us to save a lot of money. Apart from that we could have bought cheap clothes and toss it away, but you should know how bad fast fashion is for the environment.
My sister is wearing her coat I borrowed few days before and here I am with her partner’s backpack
I borrowed pants, a coat and even a bag from my sister
– Remember, sharing is caring!
2. Get Layers
Even when you come back from eternal summer, you’ll still have some warmer clothes. Put them all on you and I’m not kidding. That might sound funny, but even lightest clothes put on layers can help you stay warm. We felt like matryoshka dolls when we get off the plane in UK, but at least it was warm enough to take a bus and go to my sister’s place.
3. Wear Beanie Not Because It’s Fashionable
A lot of us wear beanies not for their practical reason, but if you have one put it on. It’s said you loose most of your warmth through your head, so it’s great to it protected form cold.
Beanie saves a lot warmth in your body
4. Use Your Yoga or Sweat Pants
As we do yoga while we travel we always carry our sport clothes with us. For women it’s great option to put on your yoga pants while it’s not the best option to keep you warm, but it will definitely save you from cold wind and you can use it as a base layer underneath lighter pants! For men it’s harder. As they tent to have short for sport and it might not save them, but it can work as a base layer too.
Yoga pants is the best option you have!
5. Buy Extra If It Lasts Long
We couldn’t manage to dispense from extra purchases. I bought a pair of good sport shoes and we both bought hoodies. But we needed it for a long time and it was an investment, because now we use it almost every day!
Comfy shoes and hoodies will last an eternity for us
6. Bonus Point
Plus just because we decided to land in UK, we could spend time together with by sister and her partner. It was one of the easies and smoothest travel back home after a long period of traveling.
Dinner with Eisve’s sister and her partner
All words by Eisve Treciakauskaite and all images by Justinas Lekavicius, unless otherwise noted.
© LongWeLive
