Catching Up - Our Fave Travel Items

We've been meaning to post a list of the items that we were happy to have packed for our first trip to Kaz. As a reminder, we were in The Shiny River Hotel in Ust for just about a month during our first trip. MUCH of this (unless otherwise noted) can be found eventually in a market or a store, but we were glad to have the items from the beginning.

• Clothes line and lots of clothes pins; had we stayed longer, we would have searched out the local laundry, but we got by with hand washing and hanging our clothes to dry.
  
• Crystal Light -- we drank tons and tons of bottled water (we'd go through a 5 liter bottle each day), and it was nice to have these mixes if you like them. We never saw anything like these in any store.
  
• Tide Pen To Go -- you can easily find detergent, etc., but not a Tide To Go Pen for emergencies.
• Duct tape.
  
• Big, big jar of peanut butter. Absolutely no peanut butter in Ust!
  
• Plastic forks and spoons -- We did not have easy access to utensils in our hotel room, and if we ever "borrowed" silver ware from the hotel restaurant, the housekeeper always confiscated it from us when she cleaned the room. :-)
  
• Mac and cheese envelopes, the kind you make in a microwave. We managed to make due with just boiling water, as we had an electric tea kettle in our room.
• Granola bars -- wish we would have taken even more than we did, and we took ALOT. We did find a granola bar-like item in the "Costco" store in Ust, but they were not the same.
  
• Two EuroSurger converters -- between charging cameras, camcorder, blackberry, and two laptops, both were in use constantly. We bought the converters from Magellan -- not cheap, but they never let us down.
  
• 50 foot phone cord. This enabled us to move the phone from next to the bed, to the other side of the room by the desk. Just your basic phone cord from WalMart, Target, etc., will be fine.
  
• Ice cube tray. If you have a refrigerator, it is nice to be able to make your own bottled water ice cubes.
  
• Lots of movies, but we also took alot of "sitcom" seasons on DVD. Many nights, we just wanted to wind down with an episode or two of Everyone Loves Raymond or something along those lines, vs. an entire movie.
• Phillips head screwdriver (for removing and installing batteries in kids' toys).
• Ziploc bags. We were always using them for something or another, but definitely available in the stores.
  
• IPod and IPod portable speakers.
• Safety pins.
• Sweet and Low or other types of artificial sweetener. If you use it, we never saw it in Ust.
  
• Febreeze -- the fabric kind. We used it as both an air freshener when our hotel room because a bit "stale" and as a "fabric" freshener for our bedspread, curtains, etc.
• Small notebook -- arrive with one, as you will be taking notes long before you get your bearings.
  
• Bug spray.
• Screen material. We ended up having screens in our windows, but if we hadn't, we would have taped screening material to our windows, as it was great to have the windows open in the Spring when we were there.