Another Oregon Road Trip in the Books
We’re back from another 9-day road trip up to Oregon. Usually we go for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but this time we went in mid-February. Who knew we’d have the warmest and driest weather of any visit for many years?
It was a good trip, and good to get together with family again. One of the personal highlights for me was our successful completion of what I’m calling the Valsetz route, a 77-mile drive on dirt and backroads from I-5 to the Oregon coast. I wasn’t sure the route was even possible, but we did it. Look for a detailed new Drive post on that route Real Soon Now. We also managed some other exploration in addition to more traditional vacation/tourist activities.
Before getting around to that Drive post, and at least one other trip post, I wanted to put down some thoughts on several of the electronic gizmos I brought. These are observations and “lessons learned”, which are constants when on the road. So without further ado, here they are, in no particular order:
USB chargers rock. More and more devices are using USB to charge, in addition to transferring data. On this trip, I also brought two GoPro cameras, with various USB-charging accessories, and these were in addition to our usual three iPhones and two iPads. I also had brought along a USB recharger for my Eneloop AA/AAA batteries. I have enough ports in the Land Cruiser to keep testy charging negotiations to a minimum, but things at our hotel (and in-law’s place) could be challenging.
As a solution, I did some research and then purchased a Sabrent 10-port USB charger from Amazon. Now instead of needing a gazillion wall outlets to charge up our devices, we could support up to ten at one time via a single outlet. It worked out as well as I had hoped, and I think we reached a maximum of nine devices plugged in at once. This charger was definitely a good addition to our travel gear.
That pesky Hotel WiFi… We stayed in our usual hotel in Grants Pass (or as I prefer to call it, Pants Grass) for one night on the drive up, and another on the drive home. On the first night, we had a strong WiFi signal in our room and no issues, but on the way home they put us in a different wing of the hotel. Signal strength in that room ranged from one to two bars, and throughput was glacially slow. We had a hard time getting some web pages to fully load at all.
However, I noticed that there was an RJ45 Ethernet jack on the wall, and so it was the Apple Airport Express to the rescue! I plugged it into a power outlet, and then ran my travel CAT6 Ethernet cable from it to the Ethernet jack on the wall. After waiting about a half minute for the connection to establish, we were gold: full strength WiFi signal and proper, rapid data transfer speeds. Frustration banished!
Because the Airport Express is dependent on being plugged into both a wall outlet and an Ethernet port, in the future I’ll consider bringing a longer Ethernet cable, or a power extension cord, or both. Happily, the short cable I had with me worked out fine this time. The newer version of the Airport Express uses a power cord, among other upgrades.
Speaking of useful electronic gizmos, my DeLorme InReach SE worked great, allowing my Father-in-Law to track our progress throughout the trip, even in remote areas beyond the range of cell signals. Well, throughout most of th trip, anyway. I find that the InReach works best when you don’t forget to take it out of the center console and turn it on. Duh.
The RAM charging cradle for the InReach worked beautifully as well. In fact, my only complaint about the InReach is the screen, which is completely and utterly impossible to read under some lighting conditions.
Having the InReach was good too, since I wasn’t able to run APRS tracking on the trip. My external GPS puck seems to have died, so I’ll have to hunt down a suitable replacement when I can afford one. eBay, anyone?
Moving along to even more electronics… On this trip I tried to rely more on my GoPro cameras, at the expense of using my dSLR in particular. I have dabbled with video before, but mostly it’s still a mysterious, dark art to me. I’m in learning mode, and there’s quite a lot to be learned. One initial observation is that video seems to take more time and effort to do properly, perhaps ideally using a second person. That might be a challenge for me.
Lastly, I ran into what could have been a problem, but wasn’t. I forgot to pack the memory card reader/adapter for my iPad. This meant I couldn’t offload files from my GoPros, or my dSLR. I’d have to make do with the capacity I had in the cards, and hope I wouldn’t need to rely on backed-up files at any point, since there wouldn’t be any.
I rarely miss lugging along a laptop (and all of the accessories) on a trip, but this was one of those situations where one would have been handy. Of course, my old iPad 2 doesn’t exactly have a lot of free space either, so that’s another issue. I also can’t really manage the files and data on my Garmin 62stc handheld GPS with my iPad either. Being able to address some or all of these issues would be a good thing. I’m going to investigate what sort of solutions are out there, perhaps in the form of a stand-alone SSD drive for backups.