Our travel strategy in recent years has evolved, in part due to our desire to photograph insects at night. Convention hotels in city don’t work well for this. Thus, we seek places in the countryside or near “natural” vegetation to the extent feasible, so that we can set up our night lights and insect “cage”. In addition, since we are up late at night, we need places with kitchen facilities so we (OK, “we” here means Rosario) can prepare our means without the need to go looking for restaurants. This can be very time consuming – something that people on “vacation” often indulge in. But since we are on more of a scientific expedition of sorts, meals cuts into our time when we can be processing photos for submission to iNaturalist or waiting for insects to arrive at our lights in the evening. Seriously sick we are...

Refrigerators are also needed to freeze our water bottles for our small flexible “ice chest” that we brought with us to keep our cold food cold during driving days. We have brought such flexible ice chests on some recent trips – we don’t like having to look for an buy better ice chests and then leave them behind at the end of our trip (cannot easily fly with them). Freezing water bottles solves the need to hunt for ice, which would melt and could make a watery mess of our food. Plus, if we have clean (boiled) water we can then drink it as it melts.

Due to our above needs we often have found that rental houses or apartments work best, since with booking.com or airb&b websites it is feasible to find accommodations other than hotels (that rarely have suitable cooking facilities). Having the peace-of-mind of having accommodations at the end of a long drive is important. We use Google imagery to identify suitable countryside locations to the extent possible, but sometimes the imagery doesn’t always give a good representation of “natural” versus cultivated landscapes. And sometimes, one has to to take whatever accommodations are available.

For some rest, it is desirable to have multiple nights in one location. Moving every night is tiring. Of course, too many nights in one location means that you end up seeing similar insects each night. We have found that 3 nights in good locations is fine – but with fewer new insects on the last nights. Of course, knowing what is common in a particular location is also useful information, and seeing “repeat” visitors (at least the same species – not likely the same individuals) is useful information to document.