Victor Epand

You are sitting at home, trying to think of a holiday destination for a gift you are giving to someone you truly care about. Where do you send them?
To make your choice a bit easier, here are the top international holiday destinations among North Americans.

1. St. Maarten: This tropical island, 80 kilometers to the south of Puerto Rico, is internationally divided between the Netherlands and France.

If you are planning a vacation, a good place to get ideas and information is to read travel and vacation magazines. Even if you just want to familiarize yourself about the world, travel magazines are a great read. They will tell you about national and international travel plans with a focus on vacation packages or tours. Some provide information about the latest deals, and how to get cheap airfare.

None of us particularly enjoy the experience of carrying our luggage around with us on the way to, or coming back from our holiday. We all perhaps wish earnestly that we could reduce the quantity of luggage that we take with us, or that somehow they would invent luggage that would be able to compress all of our belongings so that perhaps they would pop conveniently into a pocket, yet at the same time be able to be unpacked and fill an entire wardrobe.

There are a number of basic mistakes that a lot of people make when packing their luggage for a holiday, and as long as you follow a few simple rules, you should find the experience of carting your worldly possessions halfway round the globe is a perfectly straightforward one. The first thing to think about well in advance is where you are going, and being realistic about the sorts of things you'll actually need for that location.

One of the things that most people give a reasonably good amount of thought to whilst packing are the little things which can make a big difference. It's often the little things which can be overlooked, forgotten, or assumed one already has.

It's also worth giving very good consideration to where these small but important items will be packed.

Generally when people are packing their luggage for their holiday they tend to do one of two things. Either under anticipate or over compensate.

As far as the first is concerned, under anticipating the kind of weather and climate conditions that you will face on your holiday can result in either an uncomfortable experience or an expensive one as you hurriedly purchase clothing that you really should have purchased earlier and taken with you.

Don't you just hate some tourists? They always seem so prepared, so cool, calm and able to float through the whole business of travel without a care in the world, and having anticipated every potential problem. It seems that some people simply have all the luck.

And yet, the truth is that it takes very little to help solve some of the most commonly experienced problems facing tourists and travellers.

An increasingly popular item these days are bag or storage compression systems. Mostly these are advertised on television for storage in the home.

The system basically comprises of a large transparent plastic bag into which squashable items such as clothes, towels and bedding can be slid. A significant amount of material can be fitted inside these bags.

The expression 'to pack our bags' could be considered one which has two meanings: packing your luggage usually involves packing clothes, shoes, toiletries etc. into your suitcase or bag, but it could also mean packing bags into your luggage. Now, why would you want to do that?

The answer is, to help think ahead to the second time it will be necessary to pack your suitcase.

When you pack for your holiday, what is the first thing you place in your suitcase? The chances are that it is your shoes. People usually pack their shoes first because these are the heaviest and bulkiest items we take, but are also absolutely essential, unless of course you intend to spend the whole of your holiday sat on your beach.

However, shoes do take up lot of room, and a little extra thought can help to not only reduce the amount of space they take up, and the weight that they necessarily involve, but also using shoes as a storage medium themselves.