How My iPhone Makes Traveling Easier
I love my iPhone on vacation.
I love technology. I know that, like anything else, there can be a dark side to it especially if you allow yourself to be used by it instead of using it as a tool. I absolutely love my iPhone and can’t imagine functioning without it at home, much less traveling the world. I took a look at the apps on my phone to identify which ones make traveling easier. Here they are:
First of all, just having the phone makes my life easier. Being able to be reached no matter where I am is a tremendous comfort to me. I still have kids at home. I also have a business where people who are very precious to me work really hard and sometimes need me. I want to be available. You may not want to be available. To each his / her own.
Having Internet access on my phone is very helpful to me on a trip. I even stay up on my email as much as possible. Again, your mileage my vary on this. I’d rather not be under a mountain of emails from people who are now mad because they’ve been waiting for me. I’m always very careful, if I’m traveling out of the country, to make sure that I’ll have easy Internet access. I call A T & T and add international data to my account. I’m no idiot. I don’t turn on data roaming unless I’ve pre-purchased the international data.
Memo: You know, just the normal memo app that comes on your phone. I don’t know about you, but I have some great ideas when I’m traveling. Maybe it’s because I’m in the travel business but I suspect that everyone has better ideas when out of a normal routine. Be sure to record them because I promise you won’t remember them when you get back and have 5000 emails.
Skype: My office operates on Skype. I also have friends with whom that is our primary form of communication. I enjoy having access to Skype wherever I am.
Google Maps: I don’t process verbal directions. I have to see it. How great to be able to navigate anywhere via this piece of technology in my pocket.
Bible App: There are several out there, pick your favorite. Mine is “YouVersion”. I love having Holy Scripture on my smart phone because it’s lighter and smaller than a printed Bible. Especially 20 different translations of a printed Bible.
Kindle: See above with regard to weight and space of printed books. Also, when I’ve read all of the “books” I have with me, I can easily get more. (I read alot on vacation.)
Yelp / Urbanspoon: If I’m traveling somewhere where the subject of “Where should we go to eat” comes up, these apps can save the day.
AA (or the app of your chosen airline): Checking in online, checking flight status, setting a parking reminder, all very useful.
Whatsapp: This is an app that allows you to text message other users without using the cellular network. It works via Internet access. So, when I was on the river cruise (with wifi) in France last fall I was able to text message with my husband when life hit the fan as it always does when I leave. I also have friends and business contacts all over the world on my whatsapp so I can text them in my daily life without incurring international texting charges for either them or myself.
What about you? How do you use your smartphone when you travel?
Lessons Learned in France
Eiffel Tower at Night
We’re back from France. It was an amazing trip, and I’m sure I’ll write about it more in another blog post.. What I want to write about today are the lessons we learned along the way. Before the trip I wrote about the process of packing, and I’ll also write about how that all worked out. Today, though, it’s all about lessons. Maybe some of them can translate to every day life lessons too.
Here they are, in no particular order.
1) Learn the basics of the native language. We didn’t do this. I wish we had. If you learn the niceties of the language as well as a few useful things (perhaps having to do with food and things like the bathroom) people will perceive you less as an intruder and more as a guest. Go ahead, make some flash cards. You can do it.
2) Eat when you can. One day we were in a beautiful small town, but only for three hours. Because we wanted to digest all of our surroundings and record them in photographs, we elected to skip eating in the dining room on board and head straight for town. Our thought was that we would pick up one of the wonderful sandwiches that are at little shops everywhere and maybe a diet coke, and eat them while walking around. Sadly, the three hours we were there were the three hours in the middle of the day that everyone in small town France takes off in the middle of the day to go home and eat with their families. This means that every single thing is closed with the exception of the sit down cafes where you can expect it to take 90 minutes to eat.
Nice tradition, but it sure didn’t fit our schedule that day. We were starving. We did, however, find the worlds most legendary cream puff that day. There was one solitary bakery that was open straight through instead of closing. Probably not very popular with the locals to be open straight through, but were we ever thankful for those cream puffs.
3) Pee when you can. I always made sure I went right before leaving the ship. Even so, sometimes we were caught having to locate acceptable facilities. We usually found them, but even so, it took away from touring time and interuupted the enjoyment of the amazing beauty we were there to see. I will admit it was an interesting cultural experience to stand in line for the potty, pay a Euro and get a receipt indicating that we’d paid to go to the bathroom. It was also fun to put the Euro coin in the other bathroom later in the trip to gain access to the stall. Multicultural lessons abound.
This also leads to a related lesson which is, Have Change for the Bathroom.
4) Be aware of national holidays. The day we took the train from Paris to Arles (pronounced “Ar-La”) was All Saints Day. This meant that the tourist information desk at the train station was closed which meant we couldn’t ask about how to get from the train station to the ship. This also meant that everything was closed. When I say every thing I mean every.single.thing. Even the supermarkets and the pharmacies. Fortunately for us on this trip we overnighted in Arles so we got to fully enjoy the town the next day.
5) Be careful of standing in the street. We primarily visited small towns where the roads were so narrow that to most Americans it looks more like a pedestrian district than an actually street where automobiles would dare to roam. With fair regularity, cars would come by and the drivers would be quite frustrated that the tourists were standing in the street. This isn’t a problem in a major city. I don’t think anyone would make a mistake in thinking a Paris street was anything but a busy major metropolitan throughfare.
6) A photo will look better back at the hotel than it does while you’re standing in front of the actual object. My traveling companion and I both have intimidating cameras with which we digest our surroundings. (She is a much much more skilled photographer than I am. I just have the big camera and try hard.) One thing I noticed is that I would be standing in near this impossibly beautiful thing and would take the best picture I could frame up. I would look at the screen on the back of the camera at the picture I’d taken and see a poor represenation of the magnificience before which I was standing. Many times I hit the delete key on the camera. (Thank goodness for digital photography.)
Then I noticed that when I got back to the hotel and uploaded the pictures to my iPad with a bigger screen, and I was away from the actual object of the picture, I was much more impressed with the picture. So, save those pictures and delete them later while looking at a bigger screen. (Now this doesn’t apply if it’s clearly a picture of the back of the person who stepped into your shot, or if it’s blurry, or something obvious like that.)
7) Remember rush hour. Even though you are on vacation, there are many people around you who are simply moving through their normal lives. People around you are going to work, getting groceries for their familes and trying to survive.
At the end of our trip we had to get clear through Paris on the RER train and it happened to be at 5:30pm. We endured a crush of people surrounding us on the train for the two hour journey. Between really popular stops I had to close my eyes, breathe, and try not to have a panic attack. (I don’t have panic attacks, but I was seriously considering an exception.) If I’d been thinking, I would have stowed our luggage and had dinner in Paris and had a much more enjoyable trip later in the evening.
8) Remember electricity. I always travel with a power strip. This keeps me from having to crawl around a night stand to switch out my cell phone charger to my iPad charger, to my laptop cord. I have plenty of accessible places in which to plug things. My favorite purchase on this trip was a European power strip. I plugged it in and stuck my US adapters in the slots. This essentially gave me my normal power strip (at least for those things that didn’t need a converter – refer to my blog post about Electricity while traveling for more details.)
What lessons did you learn last time you took a trip? Share them in the comments.
My ScottEVest…I’ll never travel without it again.
As travel agents we make frequent trips to the resort areas and tour hotels. These trips are fun and work all rolled into one. One of the challenges (especially when I go down to video the resorts for www.MexicoBeachExperts.com) is that there are so many items I need to juggle.
- Business cards (both mine to give out as well as ones I’ve received)
- Still Camera
- Video Camera
- Extra video tapes (I use one for each resort so I can keep everything straight.)
- Clipboard with resort information
- Pen/Pencil
- Travel documents
- Itinerary information
- Chapstick
- Lipstick
- Hand Lotion (an obsession of mine…I have to reapply every time I wash my hands)
I’ve tried the backpack approach. Putting everything in a backpack results in me constantly shuffling through all of the items to find the one I’m looking for. I can’t quickly find my phone, I can’t quickly find my business cards, it’s just a mess.
On a trip last year I decided that I needed to look into a travel vest with lots of pockets. Enter..the ScottEVest.
The ScottEVest has something like 21 pockets. There is a special, easily accessible, business card pocket. There is a specific place for travel documents. There is a specific spot for your sunglasses that even has a microfiber cloth attached with which to clean them. There is a camera pocket that has a small interior pocket to hold extra memory sticks. There is seriously someplace for everything (including a pocket that is intended for extra odds and ends).
I took it with me when we went to film the Riu Resorts in Cancun and the Riviera Maya a couple of weeks ago. That thing worked like a DREAM!
What I hadn’t anticipated was how sweet it would be to have it during the actual process of traveling down to the destination. It speeded up the security process since I could just take the vest off and put it through the scanner. I wasn’t emptying pockets and whatnot.
Another benefit is that, now that Spirit Airlines is going to charge even for carryon bags, they won’t charge me for what I wear! (Not that I intend to ever fly Spirit Airlines.)
So, I’m sold on the ScottEVest. The $100.00 price tag might scare some people away, but I think its a very fair price. You can buy them on Amazon.com or right at the ScottEVest website.
Let me know what you think!
