The traveler mod has helped me quite a bit. Here is how: I no longer have missing items from personal inventory, no invisible active sims, no routing issues in Egypt or anywhere else in that matter.
However there is a drawback. For some reason in my vacation homes, I get the paper delivered by creepy bodiless children. The towns need fixing at first because they become exposed to ageing and weather, which means that you need to micro manage them to some extent to keep the neighbourhood tidy. (snow in The desert? Really?) Friends suddenly turn elder and that's just weird to occur that suddenly. I painstakingly manually fixed it for China and France, but gave up in Egypt, which I just age and weather froze. But you know watching the friends you make while on holidays age along with your sim and have children and so forth is quite touching, so I do find myself going to France a lot because there is so much room for me to plonk down houses that I let the town grown,so at the end it's up to you, and your gameplay.
Oh and one more thing, forget keeping anything in the fridge . It will be gone by the time you get back, food with soil in any chest, but you can keep produce intact in them, so there is that!
hope this helps!
