Traveling with the IPAD

I carried my new IPAD along on the three trips I took this summer --to Colorado, Utah, and New England-- and used it often for Internet searches, checking email, watching movies, listening to music, and playing games. It was a perfect addition to the portable DVD player that I always take traveling.

Mine isn't a 3G, so I made a special point to get rooms in hotels that offered free WiFi. I learned that having WiFi doesn't mean it's fast WiFi. The slowest connection was so slow that I gave up using it, but most connections were generally ok for checking mail and doing basic searching. The Hilton brand hotels (our first choice) often offered truly high speed connections good even for downloading new apps and Netflix movies. Our campground at Acadia National Park didn't have WiFi, but we found that many restaurants and businesses in the nearby towns did, and even when they didn't, we sometimes were able to "hook a ride" on an unlocked personal WIFI account that happened to be open near us.

On the flight home from Colorado I paid $13 to try out the Gogo Inflight Internet service but was disappointed that it didn't have the oomph it needed to connect to Netflix or ABC, or any heavily graphic sites. It worked fine for email, which was, in fact, all they promised. Their brochure boasted that you could impress your boss by sending work-related emails while in the air, which, thankfully, was not the appeal for me.

Knowing that we'd take lots of photos on our Maine trip I splurged and spent $25 for the Photo Connector Kit. I used it every day to transfer photos from my camera to the IPAD so we could see them on the crisp big screen, edit them using a photo app, and email them to family and friends. That was very cool and well worth the money. I also bought a car charger for those six days that we camped out with no electricity, and that was a good purchase.

We used the IPAD to listen to recorded books, podcasts, and music, read E-books, and to watch a few tv shows and movies when we had really fast connections. But we really put it through its paces as a games playing device. Its easy-to-hold big, graphic touch screen and high response speed made playing games irresistible to all of us on our long car rides and even at some restaurants. The boys especially loved playing Plants vz Zombies, and Ben and I amused ourselves with Solitaire, Chess, Harbor Master, and ArtPuzzle.

In short, we were sold on the IPAD for travel. I think our new motto will be "IPAD: Don't leave home without it." Still, there is something nice about just looking out the car window and thinking random thoughts, so we sometimes shut down our various electronic amusements and had quiet times in the car. During one of these times I heard Paul humming to himself, just as I used to do as a child when we took those long cross-country car trips. That was sweet to hear.