Wednesday 8 November 2017

Technology and travel

Usually when we've had a trip overseas I do a little blog post on how our technology worked.

This time I have almost nothing to report. I took my MacBook Air and J took her trusty samsung tablet and both worked well, and we had no connectivity problems, basically everywhere we went or stayed there was free fast wifi.

Our only problem was that we didn't have data roaming on our phones, but then there was enough free wifi around to not really need it. Next time we'll probably take an old unlocked smartphone and buy a local sim just for the convenience but it's by no means essential.

We did take the old Nokia phone with a travel sim that we'd used in 2015 and that again performed excellently as far as calls and texts went, and having a UK number people were happy to call it given that roaming charges in Europe are now a thing of the past.

As always I took an Australian powerboard and a pair of adaptors - a UK pattern one for the UK and Singapore, and a European one for Portugal.

Hardly anywhere has these so called universal sockets, and while UK and European plugs fit fine I've yet to find one where an Australian plug fits well - either too tight or too loose, never right.

I'd bought myself an SD Card reader for my MacBook for the princely sum of $3, and that worked well, meaning we had no problem backing up our cameras.

As in 2015, I took a GPS with me but this time both hire cars we had came with an inbuilt GPS and there were no silly extra charges to use them - I'd guess they'll be standard on hire cars next time we travel to Europe.

It's actually getting easier ...

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