We took a total of 18 autoinjectors with us to Dublin-- and we were only staying for three weeks. Now, granted, my DD's history made that prudent and there were two of us, so technically she had 5 refills with us and I had 4; still, we
planned for it to be difficult to impossible to obtain a refill in an urgent situation-- meaning that we assumed that it might take as long as a week to refill one if it were used.
That took some planning because our insurance company will only pay their portion of 1
pair every 30 days-- period. So in the five months before we went, I refilled them at 31 day intervals.
A zippered/secure snapping cross-body day bag
just large enough to carry your essentials (a couple of energy bars of some sort, camera, phone, and a pair of epis), a wallet that you wear on a wrist (that zips), and that under-clothing carrier for extra cash (cab-fare), passport, and an epi...
Taking just those kinds of fairly reasonable precautions, we had no trouble at all-- and we rode the Metro/Tube everywhere and visited pickpocketing hotspots galore, like Montmartre, Notre Dame, the Louvre, d'Orsay, Versailles, etc. We
saw bag snatchings and pickpocketing activity, all right.
We did okay with jet lag both directions-- but we were coming from the west coast, so a complete "reset" of the body clock, while
vicious on the outbound, was the key. We left the west coast at 6 AM, flew to east, had a long layover and flew to Europe on the overnight flight. While neither of us slept much on the flight, we caffeinated upon landing and hit the ground running. That night, we crashed (after what was effectively 40 hours awake with only an airplane catnap). DD did fine. Me, I'm over 45, and well, I won't lie-- I was pretty beat that first couple of days.
Flying home, same deal-- left mid-morning and landed back on the west coast (after ~16 hr of flights) at night. Travel being as exhausting as it is now, that worked fine, too, though I had more trouble with jet lag on the return... more just still being on Paris time, though.
The biggest thing for us was making sure that we had enough food to allow for flight delays/etc. and a reasonable supply of stuff upon landing. The TSA went through my (very carefully packed) bag and ruptured one of my bags of dehydrated fruit... and I wound up throwing it out. (and, er-- washing all the stuff that smelled very strongly of strawberries) Luckily I had planned on a margin of error.
I recommend freeze dried over merely dehydrated because of the weight and volume difference.
About 30% of our suitcases was emergency foodstuffs. Yes, this meant that we took less clothing than most people in a standard suitcase, but it was lightweight, and our bags were LIGHTER and had more room for mementos coming home.
Doing laundry in a hotel sink was really no big deal.
Rick Steves has some of the best travel advice
ever. IMO. That and Just Tomatoes were my two favorite links.
I'll dig up my planning thread for you. This is really something that she can do, in my experience. My DD could do it on her own at 20, I think. She was only 13, but made
no truly stupid moves that I could see-- she enjoyed herself enormously, but was very aware of her surroundings and the food safety issues. One problem that I
had not anticipated is that even chefs who read and understood DD's chef card... still... sometimes...
didn't get it. Like the restaurant in Paris where "no egg" apparently meant "skip the overt one put on TOP of the savory crepe" rather than "batter can't contain egg either." Luckily I know enough to recognize that what they initially sent out very definitely had egg in the crepe batter-- dd wouldn't have. Of course, her tolerance for cooked egg is high enough now that she probably would have taken a cautious sampling bit and sent it back anyway. Or at least quit eating.
She DID have a pretty significant reaction after one restaurant meal-- in Paris. No idea what it was from, honestly, because they made her a special meal, even. Had to have been cross-contamination. Had it not been the end of our first night in Paris, we probably would have opted to go to the emergency room. But air quality was SO bad that it wasn't clear at the time that it wasn't just a major asthma flare.