A Look Back, part 3

Blogging was new to our trip experience this year, but so was carrying around a laptop computer, looking for wifi connections, and carrying around two iPod Touches along with smaller video iPods. This was by far our most intensively electronics-filled trip. How did that go?

For starters, I can't say enough in praise of video iPods for children. Sure, in an ideal world, those boring hours in a car or train would be filled by reading good books or doing other brain-enhancing activities. But remember, this is a 5-week trip and we are packing light. There is no way we could have carried enough stuff to fill those down times without leaning hard on the entertainment value of those iPods. As it was, the children went through about 10 sizable books (between them), so they did read a lot. But they also watched a lot of the movies we had on those iPods. When you need to spend three hours in the car with three children packed shoulder to shoulder in the back seat, those iPods are priceless for keeping the peace and making things sane for the adults up front. Some of those drives were so peaceful you hardly knew there were children in the car.

As for the iPod Touches; until last December, I had never used one (we like electronics, but we're not on the cutting edge, either). My first impression was that the 'net wasn't convenient enough to use on the Touch, so I was unimpressed. But after getting more familiar with the various "apps", I came to understand that they had tremendous value in addition to the ability to email and (awkwardly) search the Internet. We monitored the weather, exchange rates, and news from home. I took photos of the guide book pages we needed and put them on the Touch - over 700 pages viewable as photos on a cell-phone sized device, freeing my hands from looking like a dork carrying a guide book with me everywhere. But my favorite use for the Touch was the "Maps" app. While using wifi at home, I did a map route search for each of the legs of our trip that we had to drive. I then took a "screen-shot" of each step of the route. That gave us precise, and very detailed step-by-step instruction for how to get from point A to point B every day. We left our big floppy map at home and just used the Touch for maps, even without mobile wifi. As a back-up I took some photos of the relevant atlas pages we would have used and had those available on Touch photos in case we got off track. But it was amazing how often a drive from once city to another went exactly as the map app said it would, down to the exact wording of the exit sign we were looking for.

The key to the electronics all working seamlessly - the "mother ship", if you will - was the Apple Macbook Air laptop. It provided all the storage we needed (1000 photos, hours worth of music, and 60 full-length movies) for the iPods, all the storage we needed for photos we took on the trip (no more worrying about if we had enough SD memory cards or if we would lose them), and a fully-functional, full-sized, yet extremely lightweight computer. That computer was capable of surfing the web on a full-size screen, typing on a full-size keyboard, and keeping track of our expenses every step of the way. It was like having our home-office on the road with us, and it hardly took up any space at all. In fact, having it allowed us to leave many other papers at home plus gave us peace of mind knowing that we had every scrap of trip-related information at our fingertips and full connectivity to people back home.

The only glitch in this system was the availability of wireless Internet. I was surprised how often it was provided for free at our lodgings (18 of 34 nights) or for a fee (another 8 nights). But I was also surprised how often it was not available on the streets. I was led to believe that in urban areas you would be able to tap into a wifi hot spot just by walking down the street looking for a connection. When we were looking, we had no success with that approach at all. We wound up using McDonald's a couple of times, an upscale hotel lobby a couple of times, and a glitzy Apple store in Munich when we needed wifi on the run.

On future trips I fully expect to continue refining our electronics usage to make information storage and access even more wide-ranging, yet compact and efficient.

Speaking of future trips, that will be the subject of tomorrow's blog...