Travelling through Life and Shaving Along the Way

Occasionally life gets in the way of our plans for life. That's what has happened to me for the last couple of months, but things are settling down a bit and I'm going to continue posting. The whiskers keep growing, however, so the shaving never stops. That's the coolest thing about this hobby (habit? obsession?) of mine.

One thing I've had to deal with in the past few months has been travel. Some of it expected and planned, some not so much. I've traveled both by air and by land, each presenting its own little challenges to maintaining my shaving routine. I still don't have a good answer to either one, but I'll recount my adventures here and maybe someday laugh at how silly I was during my first travels with wet shaving.

I had to take one long trip that entailed driving 600 miles to drop the family off at the in-laws, spending a couple of days there, then flying across country on a business trip, flying back to the in-laws and driving back home. I'd been starting to play with straight razors, but decided to stick with the DE for this trip in order to minimize hassle.

I packed my HD, a couple of blades, my brush, tube of C&E Nomad cream and Nivea after-shave. In retrospect, I may have chosen a different cream, because I ended up having to leave some of these things behind. But I do have the Nomad shaving soap too, so its not a complete loss. I decided that for the flying portion of the trip, I would pack the shaving supplies in my roll-aboard and check it to avoid the carry-on restrictions. This ended up being the right decision from a shaving point-of-view, but the wrong one from a travel perspective. Due to flight-delays and changes and such, I ended up flying stand-by on an earlier flight than my scheduled flight which actually took off 30 mins after my scheduled flight. And, of course, my bad never made the change. so I ended up having to wait for my bag to arrive on my original flight, completely defeating the purpose of getting the earlier flight.

Because of this, I ended up disposing of my remaining shaving cream and aftershave and carrying on my bag for the flight home. I ended up in the same situation but this time had no baggage problems. So my lesson was, keep your bags with you at all times and only bring items which meet the carry-on guidelines. Now, I am not sure how this will work for razors, but my next scheduled business trip will only be a one nighter, so I'll shave before I leave home and won't bring anything along.

The other real challenge was working my shaving routine into the limited time and space allowed when visiting the in-laws. Between sharing a room with the lovely wife and toddler twins, using a bathroom with a pedastal sink and not having much time to myself there was not much hope of a smooth shave. So I lowered my standards and skipped a pass, trying to be very attentive on each pass to making sure no spots were missed. Typically my first pass is focused on general beard reduction and I don't worry too much about how my face looks when its done. But in this time crunch, I took more care in trying to get as much out of the first pass as I could, using the second pass as a finishing pass. Given that I lowered my standards, it was a pretty effective method, though I did cut myself a couple of times, which I hardly ever do at home.

So I'm learning to be flexible and hopefully future travel experiences will be smoother (pun definitely intended.)