The big family vacation trip this year is a drive down to Southern California, spending three days at Disneyland and 2 days in San Diego. We’re starting off from Seattle, so we have a 2-day drive down, and 2-days driving back. Since we’re your typical high-tech family, we’ll certainly be toting along lots of gadgets and gizmos. Among the three adults and four kids, we’ll have this assortment of hardware with us:
- 4 laptops and 1 netbook
- 5 smartphones
- 3 iPod Touches and 1 Zune HD Media Player
- Portable DVD Player
- Apple iPad
- 4 digital cameras
So for all these gadgets, we’ll also have the associated sync cables and power adapters. Thus, that’s a lot of powered hardware to keep track of and manage! Of course, during the 10 hour drive each day the passengers will no doubt become bored and will want to use their respective electronic devices, so keeping them powered up will be an issue. Our Ford Expedition has only three 12V charger ports, so I stopped by our local Target Store and bought some port splitters which will now give us a total of 6 ports along with 2 extra USB ports. Hopefully, that will be plenty to keep everybody happy. Personally, I want to keep my Palm Pixi smartphone fully charged during the drive, so I’ve got one 12V port dedicated for my lovely Touchstone charger! š
My wife as a EVO Android smartphone on the Sprint Network, so she enabled the Mobile Hotspot feature which will allow multiple devices to connect to it for wireless Internet access. I’m not sure how well it will working while we’re driving down Interstate 5 in the middle-of-nowhere, but we’ll see.
Since we’ll be so “mobile” during this trip, I’ve decided to upload some important documents to Google Docs for online access. Information such as hotel itineraries, Disneyland Park Info, etc. should be accessible from my Pixi’s web browser.
So we’ll see how my high-tech family fares during our big vacation trip for the year. I suspect everything will go well, but we might have a few glitches here and there. No big deal, as our major destination is the Happiest Place on Earth!
Palm WebOS Ramblings 
Came across your blog while looking for the wifi update for JVault and I was curious how your August trip went, in particular all the technology you and your family carried. What did you use the most and how did you use things along the way and while there?
I appreciate your work on JVault, btw.
It’s been a while, so let me try remember…
My Palm Pixi worked great for navigation around the cities where we stopped along our trip, when we were looking for places to eat, gas stations, Starbucks, etc. I kept the Pixi constantly charging during the trip so that I wouldn’t have a dead smartphone. My emails kept coming in during the 2-day drive, which was more convenient to deal with on my Pixi than my Netbook computer.
I didn’t use the TripAdvisor.com web site very much during my trip, since I planned ahead and was plenty prepared. We did use my wife’s HTC EVO Sprint smartphone as a WiFi Hotspot, allowing various iPod Touches, an iPad, and my Dell 11z Netbook to connect to the internet. It was surprising efficient, so I’m glad my wife activated that feature before we left our home town.
One thing to note: I used a 12V cigarette lighter splitter to provide me with three 12V jacks in the back seat of our car, where I connected my Palm Pixi car charger and a 120V Inverter to which I connected my Netbook power adapter. Everything worked great until I blew a fuse in the cig light splitter. So if you’re also planning to use such a device, make sure you bring along some extra fuses. (These are the small car fuses that fit in the cig lighter plug).
Thanks for the recap! Sometimes I take the simplicity of my situation for granted (single, w/non-tech roommate). š Sounds like the hotspot worked great for that configuration of devices.