We traveled with 1 serious laptop, 2 netbooks, 2 Kindles, 2 iPods, 2 cellphones, 3 cameras, power strip, plug adapters, 3 USB chargers, a 1TB USB-powered portable hard drive, and 8 blank 16GB SD cards.
The serious laptop was a SONY VAIO Z Series that was maxed out with Intel i7 multi-core, a hybrid graphics card that could work with low power or high graphics output, RAM hard drive (to reduce chance of a hard drive failure), plenty of memory (for faster photo processing), a built-in high-quality webcam, and a CD drive and an OLED screen and an HDMI output, all in 4 pounds – at the time the absolute most function for the absolute least weight in one laptop anywhere. While expensive, I justified this because it was going to be my working laptop, our photo processing center, our home stereo/DVD/ videogame center, and a fast Skype terminal for video calls. It proved to be a super solution in all respects during its warrant period. But a few months before we finished, one of the driver chips on the OLED screen became loose. A single vertical line on the screen went dead. There was no way to have it fixed while we were on the road. Each additional month, another line would fail! Nothing to do but put up with it. Next time: do focus on a very light weight multimedia laptop, but go with a normal LCD screen. Other tips: don’t bother carrying a spare battery just use an extended life battery, definitely get an HDMI output cable and a top-quality built-in webcam.
Using iTunes and the HDMI cable, we were able to watch our favorite TV series (Modern Family, Glee) and rent movies from all over the world. You just plug the cable into the back of the hotel’s LCD TV and the whole family can watch in bed on widescreen. This helped preserve a few cherished family routines and maintain touchstones of normalcy.
The kids each carried Acer Aspire 1810T netbooks. The screens look a bit small in the store but they are perfectly sized and anything bigger would add needless weight. These could do videocalls as well (at lower quality) and were completely sufficient for schoolwork, email, web and a few games. Gina did not carry a laptop (she had all the travel documents to carry) but she could get her email via iPhone or on Carter’s laptop or by webmail.
All PCs ran Microsoft Windows, Office, PowerPoint and Email.
While the Kindles are for reading and thus semi-educational, the iTouch devices became a terrible distraction for the kids. It was just too easy to tune out of the day and play games in the back seat and miss everything. The games were too addictive to be played in moderation. We ended up eliminating the iTouches.
The Kindles worked great and we collectively read hundreds of books. We had two models – a 10” for adults and a 6” for kids. The kid Kindle bricked up after a few months due to static electricity or repeated droppings. Sam jumped into the breach and sent us a replacement PLUS an extra – now we had one for each child. Katherine was glued to hers until Kenya, when she used it to smite her brother on the shoulder and broke the glass. Now she has to be extra nice to her brother whenever she wants to borrow his! A fine lesson.(IN ALL FAIRNESS HE STARTED IT)
My smartphone was an unlocked HTC Android phone and Gina’s was an Apple iPhone on AT&T with global roaming. I had planned out a fancy system of switching SIM cards in each country on the unlocked phone to minimize cellphone calling costs, keeping Gina’s phone as a back-up with a stable number where we would just pay roaming charges as a last resort. What actually happened is we realized Skype is an unbeatable way to place cheap international phone calls even to normal phones! We used that for all outbound calls. So we only needed our cellphone service to receive the odd inbound US call, for example our doctor’s office called to schedule a check-up while we were hiking on Machu Picchu! We only received a few dozen cell calls like that the whole year. So after a while I just went back to my US cellphone SIM and paid roaming as well. Aside from the monthly charge, we added about $800 in international roaming bills for the year.
In France, Gina and I were moving around the city every day so we needed to make lots of calls. I went through a fancy SIM / wireless data saga that was detailed in a separate blog that relied on my unlocked HTC. But the best solution was exactly what Gina did – she just bought a second, cheap prepaid cellphone for the four months in France.
So the smartphones did very little calling. Where the smartphones turned out VERY important though was as an email reading client – it meant you could get email at any Internet café or hotel lobby, without carrying a laptop. We also frequently used applications for alarm clock, weather, flashlight (!), news headlines, notepad, French dictionary and French flashcards.
The camera is another important part of travel and daily activities. You need high quality so you can take great pictures and zoom and crop, but you also need light weight so your back remains sound. After careful study I chose the micro-four thirds format, which gives you a quality level that is almost as good as SLR but with lightweight camera bodies and lenses that weigh half as much as an SLR. The first body was an Olympus PEN E-P1. That served until early 2011 when Panasonic released an improved camera body called the GH2 and I upgraded to that, keeping the E-P1 body as a back-up and spare for Carter in Africa.
Both bodies could use the same micro-four thirds lenses. Since photos were so important and I was such a newbie, I got nearly every available lens and experimented. My eventual favorites for city tourism were a trio: the Panasonic 14-140mm, a 20mm pancake, and the lightweight Olympus 9-18mm wide-area lens. I would often also bring a 14mm pancake because it could deliver a reasonably wide angle on indoor shots in lower light and it is so slim. All lenses got a cap tether and a protective UV filter. This all fit nicely in a remarkably small shoulder bag (Lowepro) along with goodies: two spare batteries, a spare SD card, a mini-mini-tripod.
I did not bring an extra battery charger for any camera, but that would have been a smart move because losing or breaking this small plastic part would have caused massive headaches. We treated ours tenderly and all survived.
In my checked luggage I also brought other lenses: a 45-200mm telephoto, later upgrading to a 100-300mm telephoto just in time for Africa, and also just for kicks a Nikon 50mm 1.4 to play with in low light or portraits. Most days these stayed in the hotel but of course the telephotos were vital for nature pictures or picking out architectural detail. The beauty of the micro-four thirds system is that you can fit the telephoto lens in the small shoulder bag along with everything else! I also at one point had a 14-45mm lens but eventually sent it home as the 14-140mm was much more versatile despite a bit of extra weight.
Supplementing the main camera we had two more point and clicks. The first was a Canon Powershot S95, which is a compact point-and-click with the merit of a bright 2.0 lens that shoots well in many lighting conditions and stores files in RAW. Gina carried this in her purse at all times and it is simply wonderful – easy to grab on your way out the door and many great images. The second was a very slim SONY T5 camera that happens to be rugged and waterproof. This was vital by the pool, on boats, at theme parks, snorkeling; and it could fit into a swimsuit pocket.
My workflow was to shoot in RAW where possible and import into Adobe Lightroom 3. This saves each photo onto the PC in a directory organized by calendar date. I set up a separate Lightroom “catalogue” for each country — later I took a photo class with Steve Watkins in London and he said I should have used one catalogue and just tagged the photos by country, but I could never figure out how to make that work so just stuck with one per country. (His logic was that it is hard to search across catalogues but that was not a serious issue for me since we were always posting by country anyway.) After importing photos I would step through each and tag the good ones with Quick Collection. I would then select these according to blog post (e.g. all the pics from a cooking class) and export those to My Photos into folders organized by country and blog topic. You can easily insert a common title across each export so DSC-237839 becomes CookingClass-237839 in the file title. The jpgs were sized at 250KB for easy web downloading. Once all blogs were complete for a country, I would finally go back and delete any RAW photo file that was NOT in a quick collection (use the Invert Selection command to delete them manually — there is also a ‘refine’ command that cuts out some steps but I never tried that) and thus free up disk space.
Video files on point and shoot cameras and Olympus are imported automatically along with photos. However by some quirk the Panasonic GH2 video files are not seen by Lightroom and not imported. You have to move those manually onto your hard drive – look in the Private/AVCHD/BDMV/Stream directory on the SD card.
I went ahead and also got Adobe Photoshop with all the works to edit photos, but only used it three times. Photoshop is overwhelming to learn. It does have a neat feature to let you delete an object (like a flagpole in front of a building) and to intelligently replace it with the background. But it would have been fine to rely entirely on Lightroom.
Phew! At this point it will occur to you that all these files better be backed up. Otherwise a dropped or missing laptop would destroy months of precious work. I tried a bunch of methods for this and eventually used the following: once the bad photos have been deleted, I uploaded the good pictures onto a non-public directory on our web site (more on web site below). This chewed up lots of upload time across the year, but it had the merit that once uploaded to the sky, we did not have to worry about physical loss. On the other hand, my web host was not offering iron clad assurance. In hindsight an even better solution would have been Amazon S3 which is file storage in a cloud. Dropbox would have been fine but we had more than 50GB of data. Photosharing services like Flickr are just too proprietary and slow for this volume of data and do not save the RAW.
Supplementing the upload, especially when Internet was slow or unavailable, I carried a portable hard drive in a protective case. Every couple of weeks I backed up my laptop hard drive (500MB) to that. At the six month mark when leaving France, I bought hard drives two and three, and sent the first one back to Boston with our friend Stan Tabor for safe-keeping. At the nine month mark, we sent back hard drive two with Karen and Giles. At the eleven month mark, we sent back hard drive three with my parents. For the last four weeks of the trip we were in Africa with no Internet and no hard drive, so we backed up onto spare SD cards and kept those in a separate place from the laptop itself.
Finally, we created a rescue disk for the VAIO and carried that along as a contingency.
As you may expect, all of this careful work with back-ups created the right karma and we never needed any of them!
We had to keep these electronics charged. The best solution was to carry different adapters and a single ultra-slim and lightweight travel powerstrip from Monster. You can then convert one foreign outlet (and many hotels these days only give you one free outlet) into a luxurious six US 3-prong outlets using just a single plug adapter.
While there are some “universal” plug adapters that claim to cover many countries, these are generally for 2-prong plugs. We needed a grounded 3-prong outlet for the laptops. So we ordered separate adapters and found that seven different kinds were enough to cover all countries on the trip and we carried them in a small zippered pouch.
All of the above electronics fit into a single Eagle Creek cube, about as big as five folded shirts.
In addition to the above, we briefly flirted with a portable printer / camera with built-in printer. This proved to be rarely used and far too heavy so we sent it home after Paris.
Similarly, we bought an unlocked MiFi (?) wireless hotspot so we could in theory let all our WiFi devices share a single cellphone data line. But once we saw the prices on these data plans in foreign countries we gave it up. My cellphone also had a tether capability but we never used that again because of wireless data costs. When you are uploading tons of photos, only broadband will do.
The device I wish we had, but could not find or configure, would have let our laptop simultaneously connect to a hotel’s WiFi or Ethernet and allow our smartphones and iPhone and Kindles to participate in the background via a tiny local WiFi connection to the laptop.
Some hotels will let you connect many devices at once to a single WiFi account, but the majority restrict you to one device at any one time or even charge you for each added device. We had to transfer data by cable in these cases or just wait for the next hotel.
How to maintain data security? The majority of hotels do not require a different password for each guest which means anyone can get onto their network. The kids had their own computers for the first time and were especially vulnerable to viruses. Meanwhile we needed some degree of online banking and we would be using credit cards with random vendors all over the world. The solution was: put virus software on all machines, never use a kid computer for any credit card purchase or online financial transaction, set up a special credit card and small bank account and use them exclusively for travel expenses and purchases, so that if they were compromised then the damage would be contained; only access our main bank account from wired Ethernet or unique password protected WiFi.
Finally, we come to the website. Here is the process to set this up: (1) set up an account with a web host service – we used HostGator and happy with them; (2) use their CPanel web interface or call customer service to register an open domain name; (3) use their CPanel to install a WordPress blog for your domain; (4) use CPanel to set up email accounts for everyone with your own domain name and set up their various laptops and devices to pull down this email; (5) go to your WordPress account and use their Dashboard to choose the options for your blog; (6) go to Feedburner and set up an account that lets you maintain an RSS feed and email subscriber list; (7) most probably, you will want nicer graphics so you have to search online for a WordPress theme and pay a small fee. We used Postcard from MooThemes and it was quite good – the graphics were perfect and there was plenty of flexibility.
From here, you will be working to configure options provided by your specific theme, adding in other options provided by WordPress or by plug-ins to WordPress. I had a really hard time finding a decent Gallery / Slideshow plug-in so no great suggestions there. There are hooks to connect with photosharing sites and you can embed videos, but that did not work too well for us either since we shot video clips at high resolution but uploading big files to a sharing service takes a LONG time. WordPress is busily trying to make this easier. There was also a useful plug-in that we used to collect all of the Piggy blog posts onto a single page. Lastly, it makes sense to set up a back-up for your website. I did this manually by copying files to my hard drive, but there are plug-ins available to upload WordPress sites to Amazon S3 that are worth investigating.
In summary, it took a lot of work and planning to handle the portable electronics, phone and IT for the family plus maintain a website and backup a large number of raw photo files across a year of travel!
Hopefully the details recited here will be useful for others who face similar challenges.
