Choosing Travel Shoes for Your Vacation

Taking a break from life is an important part of staying productive, but if you don’t wear the right travel shoes on your big get-away, sore feet might take all of the joy out of your vacation.

If you’re like me and you have a hard time finding shoes that are of good quality, comfortable, fit well, and priced within your budget, it’s too much pressure to do any 11th-hour shopping before a trip. But if you know ahead of time what types of travel shoes you need, you can be on the lookout and grab what you want when you happen upon it.

Here are some thoughts to take into consideration when you want to purchase travel shoes.

What type do you need?

The type of shoes you’ll wear should be considered ahead of time because you’ll want at least a few weeks to break them in. Are you going climbing and will need specialty hiking boots? Are you going for long walks and will need water repellent walking shoes? Will you be spending time walking in freezing weather, so you’ll need insulated shoes? Will you be walking a great deal on cobblestone, so you’ll need padded shoes to absorb the shock from those hard, unforgiving surfaces? Do you need dress shoes that you’ll be able to walk in?

Be sure to break in your shoes.

I purchased a pair of Skechers about two weeks before a trip. I wore them for at least a couple of hours each day. Success – no blisters. A few days before the trip, I wore them a full day to make sure that they wouldn’t hurt my feet. They were some of the most comfortable shoes I’ve ever worn. It felt like I was walking on marshmallows – they were that cushioned! During my trip, I had to walk on uneven surfaces like cobblestone and rocks. I could feel many of those jagged edges underneath my feet. I didn’t get hurt, but if given the choice I would’ve opted for a different shoe. I hadn’t thought about testing them on uneven surfaces during the break-in period. Now I know better.

How do you know the shoes won’t give you problems?

There’s no way to ever guarantee that a pair of shoes won’t give you problems, no matter what brand you purchase or what amount you spend. Even if you don’t purchase your shoes online, you can still research online reviews to help you lower the probability of that happening.

A second step you can take is to follow my advice in the previous section. Sometimes shoes give us problems because we wear them before they’re broken in.

A third step you can take is to make sure that the shoes fit properly from the moment you try them on. Are they snug enough on your heels to stay on your feet yet not so tight as to affect circulation? Are they wide enough to allow your feet to spread in their natural skeletal position, or are they so narrow that you can feel the squeeze on the sides of your feet the moment you slide your feet into the shoes? Are they long enough so that your toes don’t hit the end of the shoes? If you’re going to be doing a lot of walking or exercising, your feet will expand. If you can feel the top or tip of your shoes with your toes when your feet are well-rested and unswollen in the morning, then you risk losing your toenails from wearing shoes that are too small.

Where can travel shoes be purchased?

You don’t need to go to a specialty store in order to buy shoes that can be worn on trips. You might just need regular walking shoes or hiking boots or comfortable dress shoes – all of which can be purchased at the stores where you normally make your purchases. But if you want to look into shoes that were designed specifically for travel and the events in which you plan to participate, here are a few specialty retailers:

Active Choices

Columbia

Magellan’s

The North Face

REI

Fashionable Choices

Orvis

prAna

Travelsmith

You can also breeze through these articles on travel clothing:

Best travel clothes according to Business Insider

Huffington Post’s employees’ favorite travel clothes

Stylish travelwear

If you’re scratching your head and wondering, “Why all of these travel-related blogs in a time management blog?”, the answer is simple. Getting away from it all allows our bodies and brains to take a break. Going on a vacation – no matter how long and no matter where – will do wonders for your productivity. But sometimes properly planning for the type of vacation that lowers your stress levels (and doesn’t add to it) can take a lot of time. To save you time and stress, I’m sharing my travel tips with you.

I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you that you could spend dozens of hours combing through websites to look for the perfect pair of travel shoes. Be sure to set a timer so that you don’t get behind on everything else you need to do because you were shoe shopping!

About Helene Segura

As The Inefficiency Assassin™, Time Management Fixer Helene Segura empowers professionals on the go with the tools to slay lost time. Personal inefficiency at work leads to increased stress levels, lower morale, higher absenteeism, more turnover – and rising spending on employee health care and hiring. Why not improve productivity, decrease stress levels, and increase profits instead?The author of four books – two of which were Amazon best-sellers – Helene Segura has been the featured organization expert in more than 200 media interviews. She has coached hundreds of clients to productivity success and performance improvement by applying neuroscience and behavioral modification techniques to wipe out destructive, time-wasting habits.Helene turns time management on its head by sharing both client case studies and pop culture examples to teach her mind-bending framework for decreasing interruptions, distractions and procrastination so that companies can spend more time generating revenue.

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