You're allowed $800 in goods per person duty free, and anything above that is taxed on a sliding scale. Declare everything. Officers are reasonable with travelers who are straightforward and much less so with the ones who aren't. Food is the usual trouble: cured meat and most fresh produce can't come in, while commercially sealed cheese, chocolate, olive oil, coffee, and wine within your allowance are fine.
The customs line
01
Check the charges from your last few days while you still remember what they were. Hotel incidentals, a deposit that should have dropped off, a dynamic currency conversion you declined and were charged anyway. These are easy to dispute in the first week and difficult after sixty days.
Your card statement
02
Not the itinerary, which I have for you. The name of the waiter who sat down with you, the street you got lost on, the thing your daughter said at dinner. Photos hold the view and lose the rest. A page of notes in the first week is what you'll still have in ten years.
Write it down now
03
Eight hundred photos you never look at is the same as no photos. Give it an hour while you still remember what you were looking at. Your phone has already grouped the journey by date and place, so the work is deleting the duplicates and the blurred ones, then picking twenty that tell the story. Caption a few with where you were and who you were with, since that's the part you'll lose first.
Sort the photos this week
04
I want to hear it, including what didn't land. The restaurant that disappointed, the morning that ran long, the hotel room that faced the wrong way. That's how the next journey gets better, and it's the only way I learn what a place is doing now rather than what it was doing when I was last there.