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...

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