Traveling with Tech

Though I'm not a diamond or platinum uber-traveler, I get around some, and I'm lugging my tech with me. I don't think much about it any more, now that I no longer try to travel with 3 laptops, 2 phones, and all the trappings. But with a recent vacation in Germany and having tried to plan for the tech my wife and daughter need as well, it made me take a fresh look. Here are some tips I thought might be useful to others.

Travel Light

Remember I said I used to haul 3 laptops? That's when a "lightweight" laptop was 7 lbs. As I get older, my body continually pushes the "acceptable" threshold downward. Since you should never put something like a laptop in checked luggage, I've found other ways of having what I need. The more you can leave at home, the happier you will be walking from one end of the airport to the other. Now I typically travel with my 3.5-lb. work laptop (if I'm working on the trip), my iPad, and my iPhone. Not too bad. But I don't really give up anything.

My personal laptop stays at home. If I need to do something with it, such as some work in QuickBooks for my wife's house-call vet service, True Companions VetVan (shameless plug--she's the best), I use a free service called LogMeIn. As long as my laptop is running at home, I can use my iPad to remotely control the PC almost as if I'm sitting in front of it. Works on pretty much any version of Windows (I'm running Windows 8), or Mac OS, or Linux. I wouldn't want to watch videos or do heavy photo editing, but for general apps it works great. It's secure, easy to set up, and it's free as long as you don't want to do more than that. LogMeIn also allowed my wife to leave her work laptop at home as well, and instead take her Surface Pro with her to do digital scrapbooking on the trip.

I find that pretty much all my other needs revolve around consuming info -- email, watching videos (local or streaming), looking at the occasional doc from DropBox or SkyDrive, and surfing -- which are jobs well-done on iPad. If things progress as I hope at work, someday I can leave the work laptop at home, too, even on business trips -- or not have a work PC at all. I pine for that day.

Security

Traveling light will also help you have a happier experience with Mr. or Mrs. TSA. As of this writing, rules say you have to have laptops by themselves with nothing on top or under when going through security. Mostly this means it needs to come out of the bag, and needs to be in its own bin on the conveyor belt. However, you can now get "TSA-friendly" laptop bags that allow you to keep it in the bag if you arrange things right. most designs "butterfly" out so the laptop is on one side and the rest of your stuff is on the other, with the bag lying flat. I've been using the Timbuk2 Command Messenger for about 6 months and love it (watch the demo video on the link to see what I mean), though I have one small beef with mine. It's built with an iPad slot inside the laptop pouch, deceiving me into thinking they could stay together. Though it worked the first few times, Mr. TSA kindly advised me otherwise. So I just carry my iPad in the other side and life is good.

If you are traveling internationally, you will find that security folks there are not Mr. or Mrs. TSA and have not signed off on such designs. They will still want both laptops and iPads out of the bag in other countries, though in return we could keep our shoes on. I suppose that averages out.

Cables don't seem to trip any triggers. I tend to have a huge mass of cables and accessories in my bag: at least one of each kind of USB cable, iDevice adapters and cables, an HDMI cable, a wired headset, headphones, firewire cable, laptop power supply, etc. When I first built this inventory I used to have it all in a 1-gallon zip-top bag and take it out separately just to avoid any issues. However, after having forgotten to take it out a couple of times, it turns out they really don't care.

Convenience Tools

If you have a smartphone, there are lots of apps available to enrich or simplify your travel experience. If you're traveling domestically, you might be able to download the airline's app (or use their mobile web site) to check in and get your boarding pass electronically. Losing the paper one means one fewer thing to keep track of. It can also keep you updated with flight changes, allow you to change seat assignments, etc.

Other ancillary services can aggregate multiple itineraries, and sometimes do a better job than the airline at keeping you informed of changes. For example, TripIt! knows gate info and alerts me to changes, even when the Delta app has no info at all. Other apps are available to help you navigate the airport, providing lists and ratings of the restaurants, layout maps, info on ground transportation, etc. These are still pretty new, and I haven't found one that includes all the airports I frequent or which consistently has good info, but I expect this will develop over time.

Travel guides can come in handy, especially if you're going somewhere you don't speak the local language. I found these particularly helpful in the planning process before the trip, but after we were under way, I also used them to find additional organized tours, book them, and check in when we got there. Some are even downloadable to be used "offline". I found that for our Germany trip, Viator seemed to have the best variety, pricing and availability for tours that were of interest to us.

In getting from place to place, don't underestimate the value of the humble Google Maps. With no car, this was vital for us to navigate Munich and Berlin on foot and through public transportation. They still label the walking and public transportation directions as "beta", but they sure worked great for us. We always wound up roughly where we wanted to be and when.

Power and Connections

Power is a big consideration for international travel, since there are a bunch of different voltages and plugs used around the world. It's important for you to know what you need before you go. You'll also want to look at the electrical things you'll be bringing with you. Most things with a "brick" or "wall wart" will likely be compatible with 110v-220v, which means they'll tend to work throughout most of the world. You can see this by reading the fine print near where the cable meets the device or on the brick itself. For these, you'll really just need a plug adapter for the wall socket.

For things without their own transformers (curling irons, electric razors, etc.), or which are older and can't handle the higher voltages, you'll need a transformer as well as a plug adapter. Fortunately these are not too expensive (we decided to get a second one after we arrived at the airport from a Best Buy vending machine, and that was about $30 for the transformer model). Most come with multiple plug types to cover you most anywhere.

Think about what you want to do on the plane itself. For a domestic trip, that's not too big a deal because the trip usually isn't that long. However, on a 9+ hour international flight, your batteries are going to be hurting if you don't sleep. For these trips, research the planes in the fleet on your airline's web site. The larger international planes usually have some portion of the cabin equipped with power outlets. Our Airbus A330 with Delta had outlets in the first 20 rows, so we made sure we had seats in that section for our return trip so my wife could work on her scrapbooking.

Non-power connectors for technology are generally more universal. For example, a PC is a PC is a PC. A USB port will work with a USB device. We had to print something at our hotel in Munich, and their public PC could read a thumb drive, or we could have connected our PC to their printer. There was some issue with their setup, though, so I wound up emailing the document to their front desk and they printed it for me.

Cellular Voice and Data

Within the U.S., gone are the days of being careful which cities you were visiting for fear of roaming charges. If you're with a major carrier, your phone will work without additional cost pretty much wherever you go. Not so internationally, even to Canada and Mexico. You will want to research this VERY carefully with your carrier, as this is a monetary minefield and could blow up in your face big time if you don't. International roaming charges are alive and well, and can clean you out.

You will also want to make sure your phone will work on the cellular network wherever you're going. Your carrier should be able to tell you this. Most newer smartphones will work most places, but you'll be bummed if you get there and it's useless. 

Most carriers have a way to purchase a certain number of voice minutes and a certain amount of data for international use based on where you go. With my AT&T account, I purchased 80 minutes and 120 MB of data usage in Europe, and that cost just under $100. The plan was to rely on wifi connections in our hotels for our primary internet and communication needs and reserve the cellular stuff for situations when we really need it.

If you look at your normal smartphone data plan, you will see that the 120MB I got is not much, and will go very quickly unless you take certain precautions. For example, you should consider turning off cellular service completely on your phone. We accomplished this pretty easily on my wife's and daughter's phones by using the "Airplane Mode", since wifi can still be active in that mode on an iPhone. Since the plan we purchased allowed me to have cellular voice active on my phone without additional cost unless I made or took a call, I left voice active in case of emergency, such as if my grandmother needed something. However, I turned off data roaming, so I didn't have access to the web. Expecting that there would be times I would want to turn roaming back on, I also modified all the automatic push email settings and whatnot so they were manual, so that when I did turn it on, it only used data for what I needed at the time.

For us, this worked out quite well. I used the aforementioned Google Maps to plot our routes and took screen captures (on the iPhone, pressing the Home and Standby buttons simultaneously for a second or so) before we left the hotel so I would have the routing available as we walked without using up data. There were a few times where we came out of a subway station and weren't sure where we were relative to where we wanted to be, or where we wanted to look around for a restaurant nearby. In these cases, I flipped on roaming, did what we needed, then turned it back off once we were back on track. Worked like a champ. Of the 120MB, I wound up using 37MB.

Money Tech

I was a little apprehensive about this, as I don't usually carry cash and wasn't sure if our debit card had what was required to work overseas. The U.S. has historically lagged behind the rest of the world with things like microchips in credit cards and so forth, and previous experience long ago in Greece when I was in college told me vendors might not be willing to take any credit card, even if they say they do. A call to my bank verified that anywhere that took MasterCard would take my debit card, and further, that any ATM (and they are ubiquitous) with a MasterCard sign would spit out Euros as needed. I changed a little cash at my bank before we left just in case, but found that it was very convenient to use the ATMs to get cash, and we didn't even see any fees added.

Entertainment

We decided that we wanted to stream movies in the evenings on our trip just like we do at home. This is not easy to do outside the U.S. because some services will detect you're coming from somewhere else and block your access. But confound it, I'm paying for that subscription for my own use and I want to watch it.

So, I used a combination of the OpenVPN iPad app and a block of data from PrivateTunnel (50GB for about $13). Using OpenVPN to connect to one of PrivateTunnel's nodes in the U.S, it makes it look as if your device is wherever that node is. So, the service will see a U.S. address and happily stream your content.

Most international flights nowadays have free on-demand movies at your seat. Cross-country flights might have a single in-flight movie or 2 for the whole plane. Fortunately, most planes are now equipped with normal headphone jacks if you want to participate in these options with your own headphones, or they will give you some free.

Many domestic flights have in-flight wifi available nowadays, and while these seem to work OK for basic browsing and email, the service is not typically fast enough to stream video. If that's your goal, I would recommend against shelling out the cash. Of course, you can always load up your own device to watch what you bring with you. I'm hauling "Star Trek: Into Darkness" on my iPad for my upcoming trip.

In either case (streaming or local content), I have an Apple HDMI converter and HDMI cable I carry in my bag. Most hotels now have LCD displays in the rooms, and with a little work, can display my movies on the large screen and better audio of the TV rather than watching it right on my iPad. If the room's remote control is the one that came with the TV, this is typically as simple as hooking up the cable and switching the TV's input.

If the remote is something else (like "On Command" or something similar), it's a little harder. There is sometimes a little cable in the back of the TV that looks like a telephone cable and is often labeled "game port". If this exists, you can try unplugging it, then turning the TV on and using the controls on the side to change the input.

Some hotels actually change the firmware on the TV to disable the input buttons, install panels to cover up all the cables, or order TVs without manual controls at all. I don't like these hotels. But most of the places I stay allow me to use the TV how I want.

Happy Travels

Hopefully this has been useful. If you have other tips, feel free to contribute to the comments.