the best we can find
Collectively, our family has been on the road for decades and we have developed preferences, of course, for things that make travel easy (or easier).
My daugher and I travel so light (and we do dress well for all occasions), that people are constantly asking us where the rest of our luggage might be.
We have to find the best to travel this conveniently: the best luggage, cameras (light weight and excellent quality), all-weather jackets, the most comfortable shoes for day and dress shoes for dinner.
I've hiked with a broken foot in Mephisto boots. Not a problem! In fact, my feet got better and I've never had a recurring problem.
One thing learned on our trips was to be very careful with the chips in your cameras. In Dublin a few years ago, my chips were filled, so I took them into a shop to transfer to disks. Because the technology was somewhat new at that time, the clerk transferred two chips onto one disk, which corrupted quite a few files.
Once home, aA "sophisticated" camera shop in Sonoma County, California, returned the wrong disk to me — it was of someone's wedding in Hawaii—the photos I turned in were of England.
And I managed to lose two days of shooting in Greece when I couldn't even find the little chip. Depressing!
As we locate items, or remember favorites, or as friends and family recommend items, we will include them here and hope that they help make your travel more enjoyable.
Wherever we go, we take along something like these Streetwise Maps (this one of Amsterdam by Michael Brown); they are laminated, hold up extremely well, and have gotten us through many cities without fuss. - Laminated City Street Map of Amsterdam, Netherlands. For Japan, we found something similar in a bookstore in San Francisco's Japantown that has images of various things we had difficulity pronouncing. When we got stuck, we'd point to the image. It was excellent.
Reading departure signs in some big airport