When you get your passport photo taken, be sure to get two extra copies... one to leave at home and one to take on holiday.

Make two copies of your passport.  Take one copy with you on vacation and keep it (with the extra copy of your passport photo) separate from your actual passport.  Leave the second copy at home with a relative.  In the unfortunate event your passport is lost or stolen, the copies will be invaluable.

Since we travel independently (not on a pre-packaged tour), in addition to the copies of our passports, we leave a copy of our complete itinerary with a relative.

By complete itinerary, we mean...  including our airline flight numbers (assigned seats, dates and times), all hotels (telephone and fax numbers for each), the schedule for trains on which we plan to travel, our planned driving routes, venues that we will visit (including their locations and telephone numbers) and - last but not least - our anticipated arrival and departure times (both in British and our home, local time zones) for each stop.

Well before our departure date, we also send a complete itinerary to friends of ours in England.  Being sure to provide our family at home and friends in Britain their respective telephone numbers and addresses.  In our passports, we make a notation - in pencil - of their names, addresses, and telephone numbers.

We think of all of this paperwork as inexpensive 'insurance'.  In the unlikely event that something untoward happens, everyone knows where they should be able to find us, at what time and via what route.