Packing to move to a new home is a splendid time for purging old things you can’t use, don’t need, never really wanted -- not to mention stuff you haven’t set eyes on for decades. As a travel journalist, though, the process is also turning out to be a rediscovery of oddball, outright weird and occasionally sentimental items I’ve accumulated during 25 years (and counting) spent tramping the globe. Here’s my Top 11 list (in no particular order) of items recently unearthed during our move -- and whether I’m keeping it, heaving it or giving it a new home. Read on …

1. FINNISH TAR CANDLES: The term alone is enough to conjure a vision of purgatory's Gift Shop of the Damned. I must have been having a really good time in Oulu, tucked on the western coast of Finland, to think a souvenir of candles that give off the aroma of tar was a cool idea. (Hint: they smell like a mix of molasses and dirty diapers.) Located within spitting distance of the Arctic Circle, Oulu, now a major high-tech center and home to the Air Guitar World Championship, was once a major exporter of tar. Today the city commemorates its stinky history with all manner of related goodies like tar candy (no, seriously), tar soap (for that fresh, death-warmed-over, after-shower scent) and the aforementioned candles. FATE: Yes, dude, they're getting the heave-ho.

2. OTTOMAN EMPIRE REPRODUCTION LANTERNS

During my third trip to Turkey, I finally found something I could afford to buy that was more aesthetically pleasing than that country’s overrated and overly chewy taffy. The round, accordion-like lanterns, bracketed at the top and bottom with ornate, hand-made metal, are reproductions of those found in better Turkish homes everywhere during the reign of the Ottomans (minus the battery-operated faux flickering lights -- I put those in for the photo). Hipster alert -- I bought the lanterns not in Istanbul's touristy Grand Bazaar but rather at a dusky little shop in the city's très smart Beyoğlu district. FATE: Keeping, natch, for those harem-scarem nights when my inner-Suleiman the Magnificent wants to party like it's 1499.

3. AUSTRALIAN DIDGERIDOO: This was a hand-made gift from the Aboriginal family I lived with during a three-week assignment in Bamaga, located in the Cape York Peninsula at the northernmost tip of Far North Queensland in Australia. I tried for months to play the damn thing – even bought an instructional CD – to no avail. The circular breathing technique required to make even rudimentary sounds proved beyond my scope and a hellish exercise in futility better left to woodwind fetishists. FATE: Why keep the didgeridoo buried in a closet when I can give it a new home, where someone might actually learn to play the instrument and thus honor the ancient musical traditions of the Aboriginals?

4. REPORTER NOTEPADS

As a rule, I don’t hoard much in life but I do keep reporter notepads from myriad travel assignments just in a case I need to refer to something down the road. My notes, as you can see in the above-left photo, are banal yet instructive (at least to me): “Two sleeping nuns. One photo op. One conductor. Pack light. And please don’t wake the nuns. Cathy [not my wife] looked like she was born to ham it up for [a] photographer on a rail journey into the Catalonia region of Spain.” I was going to throw them out -- thinking why keep notes stretching back 25 years? -- when my friend Amy said, “No way, you’ve got to keep them – trust me.” I trust Amy – she possesses that “otherness” of wisdom. FATE: Keeping (at least a few more years).

5. SALVADORAN 'SURPRISE' EGGS: Discovered in a file cabinet, these traditional, miniature egg-shaped ceramic tschotskes from El Salvador open at the top to reveal little vignettes inside – for example, a woman cooking in the kitchen or a man fishing. But the naughty versions I bought while traversing the Central American country open to expose a diminuitive ceramic couple engaged in big-time explicit boudoir fun. With this variation of a theme, the “surprise,” depending on the egg, is that you’re never certain what you’ll find the couple doing inside. I bought a dozen of 'em -- sort of like Chinese pillow cards for the ceramic enthusiast. Egg porn -- fun while it lasted. FATE: Heaving.

6. POSTER OF DOMINICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE PENA GOMEZ

I was covering the presidential campaign in the Dominican Republic, swilling Cuba libres with a few journo buddies from a sidewalk table at an Iranian-owned pizzeria in Santo Domingo on election night, when a working girl approached and offered me the above poster of presidential candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez in exchange for tuning her guitar. How could I refuse? Recently, I pulled the rolled-up poster from the dark, nether reaches of a closet shelf and boy did it bring back memories of a surreal, gonzo night worthy of Hunter S. Thompson (and, no, this had nothing to do with the woman). Gomez, one of the most prominent political figures of 20^th-century Dominican Republic, lost the election. FATE: Heaving.

7. TIFFANY ART DECO GREETING CARDS: On a visit to England, luck found me tumbling into London’s acclaimed British Museum on the occasion of a jaw-dropping exhibit of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s best Art Deco designs – jewelry, lamps, fashion accessories, vases, handbags, etc. You would have thought I had died and gone to heaven. Besides scooping up the catalog in the gift shop, I grabbed a set of greeting cards each featuring a different Tiffany Art Deco design. Lost for years in my office, I found them gathering dust behind a dresser but thankfully still in the original box. FATE: Don’t expect to receive any of these greeting cards anytime soon, buckos – I’m framing them.

8. CATALAN NATIONALIST FLAG

My heart belongs to Spain's northernmost province of Catalunya, but that's not why I so love this flag. A proper (and legal) rendering of the true Catalan flag (and coat of arms) bears only the alternating crimson and gold stripes. However, when the blue triangle and white star are added, the flag becomes a subversive, nose-thumbing symbol to the rest of España of Catalunya's muted aspirations for recovered statehood and full independence from Spain. Gotta love the Catalans. Both versions of the flag can be seen hanging from balconies every Sept. 11 when Catalans celebrate La Diada (or "The Day"), which commemorates the defeat of Catalan peasants, in 1714, fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession. FATE: I'll give up this flag when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

9. HONDURAN ‘PECKING ORDER’

At first blush this ubiquitous roadside souvenir might strike the savvy traveler as, well, "rustic." But that’s before you start rhythmically moving the paddle in a circular motion, which causes the turkey heads to begin bobbing up and down in sequence for the “food” at the center of the paddle. All of this controlled by the small wooden cube that hangs below the paddle, tethered by strings to each of the four wooden turkeys. Tacky? Well, yeah -- just look at it. Yet in all fairness the design and engineering are surprisingly clever. In my college days this primitive gewgaw would have been a stoner's paradise of weekend-long fun. FATE: A gift to my youngest nieces and nephews.

10. WALDORF ASTORIA ROOM KEY: It isn’t often as a travel writer on assignment in New York City that I get put up for a week at swank digs like The Waldorf Astoria. Evenings I would return following a day of “research” (somebody’s gotta do it) to the hotel’s legendary Peacock Alley Bar for martinis, imagining what it must have been like back in the day when then-Waldorf resident Cole Porter performed at the same Steinway Grand Piano that is still a fixture in the bar today. Sigh. No wonder I kept the room key (room 1404, to be precise). But it’s an electronic-swipe key card – not the same magic as an actual key. FATE: 10 years after the fact, I’m going to follow the instructions on the back and “kindly return this keycard to the cashier upon check out.” Better late than never.

11. CHERISHED PHOTO OF ME AND MY MENTOR

This photograph was found at the bottom of a drawer beneath a stack of reporter notepads – a snapshot someone took of me and my dearly departed mentor Len Hansen years ago at Parc Guell in Barcelona during a press trip. A pioneering journalist and newspaper publisher, Len taught me not only about journalism and travel writing, but a whole lot of other things too numerous to list here. Suffice to say, I would not be doing what I am today were it not for Len, among the brightest and most generous and creative individuals I have ever known. He opened the window and dared me to take flight. Over the years we enjoyed the pleasure of playing catch-up while traveling a fair bit of the world together while on various assignments, always comparing notes and observations about wherever it was we happened to land -- Edinburgh, Athens, Barcelona, London, you name it. From Len, I learned what it meant to have an insatiable curiosity about life and the world. Occasionally, when our travels included my wife Cathy, we were -- make no mistake -- the Three Musketeers (I have the bar tabs to prove it). I loved Len dearly and not a day goes by that I don't think of him. FATE: Keeping (and framing to put on my desk in the new abode).