Johnson Family Road Test
Vacation, digital entertainment and my experience this week. I thought I should write about my families trip and our technology gear experience. We are not frequent long-distant travelers but we wanted to take our digital entertainment along the way. Music, movies, books, etc. It was a big trip for us. We drove 625 miles from our home to Deb’s brother’s home outside Buffalo, New York. 465 miles from near Buffalo, New York to Mystic, Connecticut. And finally, 385 miles from Mystic, to home.
My wife, 5 year old daughter and I traveled with a 1st generation iPod Touch, a 2nd generation iPod Touch, a Sandisk Sansa e280, a portable DVD player, and two MacBooks. The iPods and Sansa were used often while on the 11 hour drive to Buffalo. My wife has become a fan of reading books on her Touch with the Amazon Kindle App for iPhone. Plus her music, of course. Erica’s Sansa was loaded with her music. And my Touch was loaded with podcasts and audio books from LibriVox.org. This routine happens even on short trips. We don’t fight about the radio, only about how loud Erica is singing. Also, Erica will switch back and forth between her music, her DVD player and coloring.
One issue I fought with before the trip was syncing the Sansa e280. Since Deb got her Touch, she’s been using iTunes more. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn’t work with anything that is not an Apple product. I tried Songbird and other applications that claim to sync to devices with iTunes playlists. But none of them worked well or consistently. Until I tried Double Twist. Double Twist worked perfectly. It could look at the iTunes library and sync to non-Apple devices flawlessly. This has allowed us to control our music library and playlists from one application instead of many. And Double Twist just takes care of the sycning.
I also used Handbrake to pull a couple of movies and put them on the iPod Touch as well. A great solution for traveling!
We made a couple of stops along the New York Thruway. All the plazas have wifi, but we could not get them to work with our iPod Touchs. The Touch would detect the signal and connect but then could not load a website in Safari. In my experience, the Touch does not have a good range. I wrote off the problem to range. We only stopped for a rest room so I didn’t take time to explore the plaza for a better location or to figure out the problem. But it was disappointing for both my wife and I that we could not quickly or easily check email while waiting for each other or Erica.
When we arrived at Deb’s brother’s house, we had a few moments sorting out what their WEP password was. Fortunately, I brought my spare Linksys WRT54GL router and was able to get up and running easily. I sorted out the password soon after, but traveling with a spare wifi router is almost too easy not to just use that. In fact, I’m considering just leaving the spare in the van for those occasions when I need it and have access to someone else network.
We enjoyed all the luxuries of home while visiting with the family near Buffalo. So we had no problem once we got settled in.
On Wednesday morning, we left western New York and traveled to Mystic, Connecticut. Our tent spot was about as far away from the wifi provided by the camp ground as possible. And being cheap as we were, our tent spot had no power. So we took a couple of opportunities to walk up near the access and get online. The performance was barely adequate. I was not able to update my iTunes podcatcher for new material because the attempt sucked the life out of the network. It was however fine for checking email and simple web browsing. The lack of decent bandwidth did allow us to not worry about charging the laptops. The batteries held out more than enough for our little usage over 2 days.
Of course, a flood watch and the forecast for heavy rain on our last night made us decide to head home early. We struck camp in a driving rain and started for home at nine o’clock at night, arriving home at 2 AM.
It would have been nice to have a smart-phone with a data plan but it’s not an expense Deb and I can justify in our budgets. We were able to go mobile with all the entertainment we wanted and kept up with our online social life to our satisfaction. And despite the rain, it was a good vacation!
Of course, this is the experience Deb, Erica and I had. Your mileage may vary!
