This time next week I’ll be one day into my first trip to Hawaii and my first extended trip since my cross-country trip in the summer of 2017. It’s also my first plane flight since 2017. After moving to Las Vegas and before COVID I made the regular short holiday road trips to So Cal but I feel like I’m really out of practice and have gotten a bit too used to staying home and celebrating the holidays solo. Not this time.
One slight twist that I’m having to prep for is that I’ll be traveling using my iPad (and iPhone 13) as my main tech. I traded in my MacBook Pro laptop several months ago when I bought my Mac Studio, so this will be the first trip without a “real” laptop. Anyone who knows how connected I am to my technology can imagine how much of a stretch this is going to be for me. From previous travels I know that I shouldn’t expect reliable Internet connections (like I’d have at home…). So, whatever media and files that I think that I might need I’ll need to have on some form of portable storage. Time to back up files and organize photo libraries. That’s why I’m starting this process now. I would like to continue my daily writing and hope to begin some of the long form writing that I’ve been hinting at, so that’ll require that I make sure that I have the app (Scrivener) and all the needed files ready to go.
Right now I’m using a 40” monitor (and a 27” screen in a vertical configuration) and across the room I have another computer, a 27” iMac with it’s own 27” secondary monitor. I’m going to have to get used to only using my 10” iPad once I’m Hawaii-bound. That’ll be a bit of an adjustment. When I did the 41-day cross-country road trip, I knew that most days would be spent in the same place for multiple days so I brought along one of my large monitors (20”) to use with my 16” MacBook Pro. Too bad the wifi and/or Internet connection for a lot of the trip was crappy. Having a lot of screen real estate is easily made worthless when you can’t connect to anything. So, there’s a lot of that trip that I still haven’t “archived” or edited or organized. That’s on the forever to-do list. The point is that I’m hoping that I will have plenty of reflection/writing time, but I’m not counting on doing too much media editing. I thought for a split second that the Mac Studio isn’t that big and would easily fit in a bag. But then I’d need to borrow (or rent) a large screen and I’d need to pack a keyboard and mouse and… yeah. Let’s not do that and see if we can get away with just using my 2020 iPad Pro. I also toyed with the idea of getting a 14” MacBook Air for the trip, justifying the expense with the idea that this will probably be the first of many trips. But I’m really trying to cut down on expenses and want to see if the iPad alone can get the job done.
On the plus side, because I’m not bringing a laptop and related gear, and because I’ve “down-sized” my cameras to one Sony mirrorless camera , I’m planning on using just my camera sling bag for my tech gear and a small carry-on roller-bag for the rest of my luggage. When I switched from my Canon DSLR to mirrorless I discovered that I could pack two small cameras and two lenses into my Peak Design Everyday 10L Sling with room for my iPad. Previously I thought I needed to have a big enough backpack to carry my 16” MacBook and iPad and two cameras and lenses and lights and little wonder I ended up with back issues. I went through a lot of camera/laptop travel backpacks before I realized that it was better to separate out the “plug in the wall” stuff and keep that in my roller bag with my clothing and keep in my tech bag only what I would need on the move. The thought here is to really downsize as much as possible and quit acting like a pack mule. It’s kind of the extreme opposite compared to all the stuff I took with me when I did the 2017 cross-country road trip.
Okay, it’s time for me to start moving files around and see what tech works with what gear and charge up all of the batteries. T-minus 5 days.
