New Year, New Travel Tech (Premium)

What a difference a pandemic makes: With our vaccinations scheduled, we’ve started plotting some long-delayed travel. Tied to that are some equally long-delayed purchases that may interest you. None if particularly life-changing. But each, in its own way, is a bet that the future could be something close to normal again.

We’ll see how that goes. But as of today, everyone in my direct family has received at least one vaccination, and my second vaccination is scheduled for this coming Tuesday. But the bigger concern, from a scheduling perspective, is the rest of the family. We won’t travel on a plane until everyone is fully vaccinated, and we probably won’t travel as a family until late summer at the earliest.

But my wife and I aren’t going to wait for that. We had been waiting for her to get her first vaccination, which happened just this past Wednesday, so we could figure out the earliest date that we could fly. That requires a bit of math: Her second vaccination isn’t until April 28, and you’re supposed to wait a few weeks before its effects are fully realized, which puts us at mid-May.

But May is going to be a busy month. We’ll be collecting our daughter early in the month to bring her home after her first year at college in North Carolina. My son is graduating from college in mid-May, and we’re hoping to be able to attend the graduation ceremony in person. And then our friends in Boston have scheduled a long weekend get-together for late May. As much as we’re eager to really fly again—all three of those events will be drives, not flights—there’s just too much going on.

So June it is, then.

June isn’t as busy as May, but we do have two minor league baseball games scheduled for the first half of the month. We normally buy a 9-game package for the local team, the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, but we obviously couldn’t attend any games last year, and this season has gotten off to a weird start with lotteries for game tickets for the first few months. I wouldn’t have personally factored baseball games into my travel decisions—traveling is a lot more important to me than a baseball game—but my wife wants to attend the two games, so now June has turned into the second half of June. Fair enough.

As for the “where” of this equation, we’ve long wanted to expand past Europe, and given the situation there now, 2021 is sort of forcing the issue. So we chose Mexico City: It’s a 5-hour direct flight from Newark and we had more than enough flight credits from our COVID-cancelled 2020 trip to Paris (for our 30th anniversary) to pay for the tickets. Indeed, compared to European travel, the Mexico City flights were reasonable regardless. We scheduled the trip for five nights, from June 17 to June 22.

I hope it happens. After all, there are worrying signs of a fourth wave of COVID-19 infections, and we’re collectively tired of the lockdown and many are letting down their guard. But I also believe it will happen. Technically, we could have flown to Mexico at any time during the pandemic, after all, and it wasn’t until January 2021 that either country required any COVID testing at all.

And you can tell I believe this because I’ve started making purchases that are related in some way to travel. Not just this coming trip, but the many trips we hope to take in its wake as well.

First up is Global Entry, the trusted traveler program offered by the U.S. government that expedites the customs process when you return to the country from an international destination. I’ve been a member of TSA Pre for many years—it expedites the security line on domestic flights—but I can’t explain why I didn’t join Global Entry, given that it includes TSA Pre and that I typically fly internationally enough to warrant it.

As it turns out, my wife and I both applied for Global Entry sometime in late 2019, and we were conditionally approved on October 31, 2019, which I only know because I just signed in to the site for the first time in over a year and a half. But we had never booked our in-person interviews, which typically require you to go to an airport, because the pandemic happened. So we just booked them, finally—we couldn’t get one until the very beginning of May—and I was happy to see that we had already paid the $100 fee, so delaying things until we could fly again will work out: Global Entry lasts for five years before you have to re-up, so signing up just before last year would have been a waste.

With the thoughts of flying still fresh in my head, I started thinking about some related tech purchases I’ve also delayed.

The most important, to me, was getting a good pair of noise-canceling headphones, which are so necessary on noisy planes and other forms of transportation. I’ve long used and recommended the Bose QuietComfort 20 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones, but thanks to the relentless march of time, these headphones are less than ideal now. For starters, there are different versions for Apple and non-Apple devices, so moving between ecosystems is less than ideal. They’re wired, and many phones now require a dongle, and often a specific dongle. And even with a dongle, the sound often distorts and gets buzzy. I just need something more modern.

Fortunately, Bose delivered that during the pandemic with its new Bose QuietComfort Earbuds. They’re expensive at about $280, but they appear to offer best-in-class noise cancelation, and based on my positive experiences with their wired predecessor, this was a no-brainer for me. So I ordered a pair that should arrive tomorrow.

Less critically, I’ve been thinking about replacing my Apple iPad for a while now. The version I’m currently using is a 6th-generation silver (white) iPad with Wi-Fi (which I only know because I looked up the model number). This is the classic design with the large bezels, and I upgraded to a 128 GB version because I load it up with video content when I travel by air. Which … I’ve not done in quite some time.

I can’t recall when I purchased this iPad, but I know that I replaced an aging iPad Mini at the time, and it appears that Apple first released this iPad in March 2018, so it has to be about three years old. Despite its beaten-up corners and threadbare cover, the iPad is physically OK, at best. But the bigger issue is that its reliability and battery life have plummeted over time. Some apps, in particular the Google app that I use to read my feed, are often unable to display content. If I kill all of the other running apps, that sometimes works for a little while. But then I need to reboot the device, which works for a while longer. Twice in the past year, I’ve factory reset it too. But the problem keeps coming back.

I’m not a huge fan of solving problems by spending money on another version of the product that’s causing me problems. But it’s not like there’s any viable competition to the iPad. So I’ve had my eye on the new Apple iPad Air since Apple announced it late last year. This 4th-generation Air shares the look and feel of the iPad Pro (and iPhone 12) lineup, which I like. It comes in colorful new colors, which is fun. It has a bigger 10.2-inch display in the same basic size and shape, USB-C, and stereo speakers, which are all improvements. Yes, it’s expensive at about $600, but it should last another three years or so. And I do use the iPad every single day for reading via Kindle, Medium, Pocket, Google, Google News, and The New York Times.

This time, I opted for the Green version and I grabbed a Cyprus Green Smart Folio as well. (Green is my favorite color, and I’m still a big fan of the Midnight Green color of my iPhone 11 Pro Max.) But I stuck with the base 64 GB model instead of upgrading to 128 GB: I think we’re at the point now where Wi-Fi on planes and in hotels is good enough to stream content, and I should be able to still download at least a few movies for each trip if needed. This is an interesting trend that started first with laptops, where less storage was needed as we moved to smartphones and other mobile devices for non-productivity tasks. And then it continued with those same mobile devices as streaming services matured, cutting down on the need for storing content offline like a squirrel loading up on nuts for the winter.

Thinking more broadly about travel, I think I’m OK with most of the basics: I have laptop bags and luggage that I like, for example, and I don’t think I need any more dongles or other doohickies. But as we get closer to that first flight, something may occur. For now, the very act of preparing for such a trip  feels so freeing, so much like a new beginning. And while there will be bumps along the way, 2021 is already shaping up to be a much better year than 2020.

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There are some affiliate links in this article. It’s something I don’t do that much, for whatever reason. But if you do think you want to buy one of the few items I linked to above, I can always use the help: I use the pittance I make from affiliate links to buy personal tech.