Wed evening - I'm lazily unpacking and it seems I had Q246 in notes (including a single Q100 note which I may set aside as a souvenir) and a tiny handful of change left. This is a fairly good result, I didn't go right down to the wire or get stuck with loads of currency which might devalue before I can next use it, and as already noted I didn't indulge in any excessive spending at the end of the trip to burn through cash on hand - maybe those breakfasts at YTPT were a tiny bit pricey, but not excessively so.
I wore just about every piece of clothing I took. The synthetic combat trousers with zips on the three main pockets were worn almost every day - I only wore the other Rohan pair of trouser when the former were in the wash. Having the zips on the pockets was incredibly useful; while it was annoying not to be able to put my hands in my pockets, the reduced loss of things due to them falling out of pockets while slipping over on hikes or sitting down on buses was invaluable. I don't know if the zips seriously help reduce the risk of pickpocketing, but even if they don't they're well worth having.
It's tempting to replace the Rohan trousers with a second pair of those combat trousers, but for now I'll resist - the Rohan trousers are a tiny bit smarter and that just might occasionally be helpful, and they do presumably have plenty of wear left in them.
I would have liked to have had more long-sleeved T-shirts but as already noted I had trouble finding any before I went.
The cheap Karrimor Mount Low 8 walking shoes worked out great, no problem on any of the hikes and they were fine for everyday use too, given I didn't have to meet any overly-stringent dress codes.
I could have got away without the waterproof shell jacket and over-trousers as most of the time the option to hire clothing existed but it was nice not to have to and while they're bulky-ish they aren't overly heavy.
I finally used the backpack capabilities of my bag - I normally just carry it by the handle - and maybe I will now start to use it as a backpack during "normal" travel sometimes. I could have hired a backpack where absolutely necessary, though, and I do still think it might - if I could find something otherwise sturdy and reliable - be nicer to save the weight of the suspension system in my bag, given it's a significant fraction of the packed weight.
I do intend to go through the non-clothes items I took and see which weren't used, but probably not right now. I should definitely have taken *way* more disposable plastic bags, given the eco-fascists have made them harder to get hold of in daily life.
Especially once I ended up staying in dorms towards end of trip the contents of my bag just degenerated into a pile of loose clothing and so on; I think I didn't lose anything but there's probably an element of luck there. My really small fiddly bits all lived in the tube cube as usual, but everything else was lose. Some thought on how best to organise this might help. If nothing else having a couple of coloured plastic bags for clean and dirty clothes might help, though I'd have to be careful not to take laundry in to a shop in the dirty bag as they might well discard it.
Thu afternoon - think the novelty of putting toilet paper in the toilet bowl is finally wearing off a bit. Was definitely feeling a bit strange to be doing that yesterday.
Fri 1105 Though not strictly a travel thing, my switch to using a binder clip instead of a wallet to reduce the bulky crap in my pocket was partly prompted by being on holiday and knowing I often wouldn't be wearing fleece/jacket. This has worked out fairly well and I intend to carry on with it. Undeniably it's not as convenient for getting cash in/out as a wallet (but I'm sure it will improve with practice), but it's OK and the reduced volume in my pocket (comfort/appearance/possibly reduced attractiveness to passing pickpockets) more than compensates - I naturally spend way more time just carrying the wallet than getting cash in/out.
Sat 2231 Just reminded by watching random Youtube video: using my smartphone (Priv) and a USB OTG cable and a USB SD card stick to copy photos off camera SD cards onto phone and then onto other larger SD cards worked pretty well. If I had a netbook or similar with me I might have faffed around geotagging the photos from GPS tracks every few days as I did in the past, but I can probably do that back here at home and this isn't a huge loss. While the bandwidth consumption was occasionally annoying and the files are compressed further (I had to download everything from Google Photos in order to get hold of the Google Assistant generated images en masse), the way this automatically gave me an online backup of the photos as a last resort was also pretty cool; better than faffing around with a Flickr uploader in the past for just a small selection of images.
Let's send this now before I completely forget or lose it.
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