What I Use: 2020 Road Trip (Premium)

For the first time in over six months, I’ve had to think about which personal tech I would need for a trip away from home: My daughter’s first year at college is finally starting—late, thanks to COVID-19—and we needed to drive her to Charlotte and figured we could take a few extra days off and visit the area. But it’s been a while since we’ve traveled. And we’re out of practice.

But let’s see. What is it I used to do?

Getting ready

Ah yes. I have a set of organizational bins in my home office that used to hold our kids’ toys but is now used to separate out my various gadgets, cables and plugs, and other accessories. Two of the bins are specifically travel-related. One is for longer-term trips, like home swaps, and has electrical converters for various countries, sleep masks, and the like. And the other is for business trips. This bin has my “go bag” that I bring on every trip, some travel extension plugs, USB hubs, and the like.

As I do on every trip, I emptied the go bag and determined which of its contents needed to come along on this trip. This is what was in there since my previous trip, in February.

The road trip is a bit different because we’re going by car, so I can be less aggressive about going light, and that worked well this time because it’s been a while anyway.

The next task is picking a laptop bag. As with the travel-related bins, there are two I use for different reasons: For business trips, I use a Rick Steves Velocé Shoulder Bag that’s lightweight and portable. But for home swaps and longer trips, I’ll bring a bigger eBags Professional Slim Junior Laptop Backpack that can easily accommodate two or even three laptops.

The bags were gathering dust in the corner of my office. But I brought the bigger bag because, again, road trip, and because I wanted to bring two laptops. Two large laptops, in fact: The HP Envy 15 and Dell XPS 15, both of which I need to review. The eBags bag swallowed both, plus their large power adapters, a portable display, an Xbox One controller, and my iPad, with no issues at all.

The drive

The trip started last Sunday morning: We has borrowed my sister’s vehicle, a Nissan Pathfinder, because it is much bigger than our tiny car and we figured we’d need the space.

We did, but there was still plenty of room to see out the back above all the bags. I guess my daughter has adopted our “pack light” philosophy, so that’s nice.

It’s an 8-hour drive, roughly, from Emmaus, PA to Charlotte, North Carolina, and that’s about what it took, even with a few stops for food, gas, and general leg stretching.

We used Google Maps to navigate, and it correctly warned us about several police speed traps along the way, which was appreciated. It also missed a few, but I got lucky in both cases as I tend to drive about 80 miles an hour on open highways in clear weather.

There were no issues big or small on the trip down or the trip back.

Moving in

We spent the first two nights in Charlotte, with our daughter in her own hotel room the first night, and then we moved her into her dorm room the morning after we arrived. This would normally be a zoo, but thanks to COVID-19, it was very quiet, and we had no issues pulling right up to the closest door to her dorm, unloading everything, parking, and moving her in. She’s in a unit that would normally house four students, with two bedrooms and a bigger separate shared room, but it’s just her and one other, and so they each have their own bedrooms. Her setup is about four times the size of the room our son Mark got for his own first year of college, and it’s a lot nicer too.

Tech-wise, she’s all set with Wi-Fi, of course, and has her iPhone and MacBook Air. And I gave her an HP printer to use at school.

Useful tech

The second morning in Charlotte, our daughter texted us from her dorm room: She couldn’t find her AirPods and wanted us to check whether she had dropped them in her hotel room, now vacant, or the car. My wife called the hotel and once again, COVID-19 proved somewhat beneficial in that the hotel waits 24 hours before cleaning a room. And so we got an extra key to check for the AirPods. While my wife was doing that, I remembered that Apple has a “Find Your” app that I can use to find any of my family’s Apple devices, including Macs, iPads, iPhones, and, yes, you guessed it, AirPods. It reported that Kelly’s AirPods were last seen in the hotel the morning before. So I told my wife that, and she found them in the room, a white case on top of the white sheets, and too easily missed. So that worked out.

Tech to go

I worked from the HP Envy during the stays in Charlotte and Asheville and let it naturally run down the battery so I could move towards a semi-accurate real-world battery life measurement over time. That first hotel had decent Wi-Fi, but no Ethernet, and it was kind of interesting how quickly and easily I switched into my normal work-travel mode. No issues.

Out and about in Charlotte, I also noticed that I was able to get a 5G connection on the Note 20 Ultra for the first time; I also saw this in Asheville. (There’s no 5G in Pennsylvania.) I did a few speed tests, but it was never all that impressive, even when it looked like a had a lot of bars. But I was surprised to know that my Mint Mobile SIM even supported 5G, though I know it’s now offered through this service. (It wasn’t when I signed on earlier this year.)

My wife and I have watched a TV show episode or two each night during the trip, which is sort of unusual for us when traveling, but everything is unusual now, so whatever. We’re currently binge-watching The Crown on Netflix, which is excellent, and I figured I’d be able to cast the show from my phone to the smart TVs in the hotel rooms, but that never worked; I guess LG doesn’t support Miracast or Chromecast. So I thought it might be interesting to test whether the HP or the Dell provided the better viewing experience on the first night instead.

We watched one episode on the HP Envy 15, using the web version of Netflix, and it seemed to work well enough even though I couldn’t find the expected Dolby Atmos interface; it turns out that HP uses a Bang & Olufsen Audio Control utility instead, and it has preset equalizer settings you can use, including one for Movies. So we used that.

For the second episode, we tried the Dell XPS 15, which has a brighter, more color-rich display and a Dolby Audio utility for tailoring the sound. It was noticeably superior, especially from a sound perspective, with a nice, wide stereo effect. So while I’ve continued using the HP for work, we used the Dell for videos going forward.

Asheville

On Tuesday, my wife and I bid farewell to our daughter and headed to Asheville, North Carolina. It’s about a two-hour drive west from Charlotte, and this time we didn’t really need to worry about speed traps because it rained—and very heavily, to the point where we almost had to stop driving—for much of the drive. But we still made the trip in the expected two hours, and pulled into this much cooler place, which is very similar to Vermont and the wooded parts of Colorado, with kind of a hippy vibe, lots of consignment clothing and vintage stores, and so on.

Here, we had specifically chosen a hotel that had an upgradeable, high speed Internet connection, because I knew I’d be recording Windows Weekly while there. But I was horrified to discover on our first day that the speed was 6 Mbps down and about 20 up. Nervous, I tested it the second morning, ahead of Windows Weekly, and found that it was 20 Mbps down/20 Mbps up, which is … OK, I guess. We get 330 over 30 Mbps at home, and could get 1000/1000 Mbps on FIOS if we had stayed in Boston, so that kind of puts these speeds in perspective. But the podcast seemed to go well enough.

I continued my HP Envy 15 usage on battery, except during the Windows Weekly recording on Wednesday, when I plugged it in to be safe.

Final leg

On Thursday, we had originally planned to drive to Harrisonburg, Virginia so we could split up the drive home over two days and take it a bit easier. But Harrisonburg is currently a COVID-19 hotspot, so we drove to Woodstock, VA instead, which somehow has a 0 percent COVID rate, according to Google. We didn’t do anything there except grab a meal and watch some videos.

On Friday morning, we got up early of our own volition and decided to just get going and drive home. We arrived just before noon.

Overall, we drove about 1400 miles in 6 days, with about 22 hours or so of driving. We drove through six states—Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee—and had a couple of spectacular meals, mixed in with a lot of fast food. For the first time since June, I had a week without 7 days of at least some exercise/activity, according to Fitbit; I only hit 4. But in the good news department, for the first time in possibly years, I had a solid 7 days straight of “good” sleep (80 points or higher), again according to Fitbit.

Anyway. I’m home again.

Triage

After any trip, I like to examine what I brought across my luggage and laptop bag and see what I used and what I didn’t. Perhaps not surprisingly, being out of practice, there was a lot I didn’t use, particularly with regards to clothing. But that’s fine: We went by car, not plane, so we could afford the extra space.

And I still managed to pack “light,” with just two bags, though both were stuffed. I’m OK with it.