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Shaving on vacation for me has always been a mixture of excitement and d'oh!-factor. Excitement because I'm trying to pull off a precision grooming move in a strange bathroom with weird light and unpredictable conditions -- D'oh! because invariably I either forget some crucial part of the rig, or the parts I bring don't work out for whatever reason.

For awhile now, my travel dop kit has carried pretty much the same rig -- Merkur HD razor, a tube of Taylor's lavender shaving cream, the peewee Vulfix travel brush without its container tube, and a mess of no-name Israeli Personna blades I got on eBay, figuring that if airport security ever took my blades at an inspection, I'd only be out 15 cents a blade. Never mind that I think nothing of buying $14 worth of dried papaya spears at the airport gift shop -- if I'm going to surrender some DE blades, they better be cheap as hell.

This trip, however, I overhauled my entire travel shaving rig. Out went the Merkur DE, the weensy Vulfix brush, and the tube of Taylor's lavender. In their place went my newfound friend the Eversharp Schick Injector loaded with a Feather Pro Super blade, a pack of Schick Injector blades, a Simpson Chubby #1 best badger brush, and a tube of Taylor's rose shaving cream.

The razor swap I did because the Feather/Injector has become my new daily shaver. The Taylor swap was simply due to wanting the same rose cream on the road that I shave with so often at home.

The brush is a longer story. Yeesh. Okay, here we go. I bought one of these $155 shaving brushes back when I first got serious about wetshaving, because a few self-described gurus on the Net had said that Simpsons were the best possible brush you could buy at any price. So rather than screw around, I bought a Chubby #1 which, believe it or not, is one of the least expensive in the Simpsons line.

Except that when I started using this expensive (to me) brush, it didn't really do anything better than the $40 Art of Shaving brush I'd been using for years. In fact, some things it did worse than the cheaper brush. And when I bought a $90 Vulfix #377 from Ray at Classic Shaving and it utterly mopped the floor with the more expensive Simpson, I threw the Chubby into my shaving crap drawer and never looked back.

Still, it's been gnawing at me that I have this $155 brush just sitting around doing nothing. So I figured what the hell, I may as well use it as my travel brush. It's small enough, and it doesn't outright suck, so why not use it on the road at least, so I'll feel better about things? So I did.

But here's the thing. The $155 Simpsons brush isn't as good as the $55 Vulfix travel brush. Not even close. With the Vulfix, I can turn a quarter-sized dollup of Taylor's rose into enough thick, rich lather to last 5 or 6 passes easy. But the Simpson brush, with the same dollup, is good for maybe 2 passes at the most before I either have to manually squeeze the brush until some usable lather oozes up out of the bristles, or I have to add some more cream to the brush. Seriously, after the second lathering, the Simpson brush is spent. It was a major error on my part to swap out the little Vulfix brush which has always served me incredibly well for this overpriced Simpson brush. When I get back home, the first thing I'm going to do is put it up on eBay, and return the little Vulfix to its rightful place in my dop kit. Then, and only then, will I have the perfect shaving kit for the road.