As a sub-tropical Australian, I get nervous if sunlight falls on my eyes or face for any length of time.
Obviously, the best solution for this problem is to wear a hat when I'm out in the sun, and the best sort of hat to travel with is a floppy hat!
The most effective style of hat for keeping the sun off your face and out of your eyes is a wide-brimmed hate. The big issue with a wide-brimmed hat is packing it when you’re on the move - it's easy to crush the crown and crease the brim. You can carry any delicate hat as you travel by packing the crown with soft clothing such as socks, underwear or tee shirts (all clean, of course) and then packing other clothes around it, but this restricts and complicates your packing.
The best answer is a floppy hat - a floppy hat can be easily packed amongst your clothes in your bag, or wedged into you day pack with little effect on its appearance. (Part of the reason that squashing your floppy hat into your bag doesn't affect its appearance too much is that its appearance is pretty ordinary to start with – it's just as well that floppy hats have important advantages, because they look daggy, especially when you have the chin strap done up!)
Floppy hats usually have a chin strap which is great for relieving the hat-loss anxiety associated with wearing one while admiring the view from the top of a cliff, a water-front quay, or up on a high castle wall, where a puff of wind can take a hat off your head and whip it out of sight in an instant.
A floppy hat really is the best travelling hat!
There are many brands and styles of floppy hats - mine is an American-designed Outdoor Research hat. It was ridiculously expensive for what it is, but it has one outstanding feature - it fits on my 63 centimetre-circumference head, which no other floppy hat that I have ever tried on has done, and I looked for a long time before I found this one.
If size was no limitation I may have gone for the hat that my travelling partner has, an Australian-designed Mont. The Mont hat has a stiffened area at the front of the brim, which helps to keep it from flopping down in front of your eyes, or blowing upward in a strong headwind (which adds another whole level of daggyness to the look).
By the way, Hot sunshine on the eyes, face, and neck doesn't seem to be a problem for anyone else in Europe – even in the sunniest and hottest summer weather that I've recently experienced in London or the Netherlands no one ever wears a hat, neither do they in the bright and sunny winter in Spain where I am now, although, that may be different in the middle of summer. Wearing a hat, especially a wide-brimmed hat, in Europe really marks you out as a visitor!
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