Here in this transitory narrative moment from India to SE Asia, I thought I’d take a second to do a quick gear post, lest the series get completely abandoned. This post is about all the technology that we’ve brought with us. We are far from being digital nomads but we’ve still managed to pack a good amount of electronic accessories with us. They’ve been indispensable in keeping in touch with people from home and in keeping us from the traveler’s malaise. We might be traveling through beautiful and exotic lands but hotel rooms are just as boring here as they are everywhere else.

We’ve got three things with us that keep us wired up: our Kindles, my unlocked smartphone, and our Chromebook.

I’ve got the Kindle DX that I inherited from Barbara Kirk. It’s big, has an awkward interface, and has no back-light, and I love it. The size is great for reading, the interface doesn’t really matter at all, and requiring a light source makes it feel more like a real book. Plus, it uses a 3G connection to download books, and I’ve been able to use it pretty much everywhere we’ve been.

Marisa has a Kindle Fire that feels more like a tablet than anything else. It’s got a nice screen, a wifi connection, and lets you play games and browse the web. Oh yeah, and it has books on it too =) It’s been really useful as a secondary internet device when we’re researching the next place we’re going since my phone is pretty small and can be a little slow.

I also brought my unlocked Galaxy Nexus, which has been a huge boon for us. We’ve been able to get SIM cards in India and Thailand so far and mobile use here is dirt cheap compared to the US. It has been really nice to have the ability to call places if we ever get in a jam. It’s also nice to have a little piece of home in my pocket with my favorite games and some favorite music. Unfortunately, I dropped it in a theater in Zurich where we saw Gravity and the screen got pretty severely cracked. It still works fine but I’m worried it’s slowly getting worse. Hopefully it makes it through the trip and I’m able to get it fixed.

As an extra bonus, I’ve been using an app called GPSLogger to record our days of significant travel and my brother Andrew has been kind enough to upload them to a Google Map he set up. It works without access to a network so a lot of our travel through pre-SIM card Europe was recorded. It’s very cool to see our actual routes through the cities and across the countryside and I’d suggest it to anyone that has a similar device.

Finally, there is the mothership of our digital fleet: our Samsung Chromebook. We bought this bad boy at the Best Buy on 14th St NW in DC for a whopping $249 plus tax. For anyone not familiar with the Chromebook family, a bit of explanation. They are very barebones laptops that run the Chrome OS instead of Windows or Apple’s OSX. It’s a really simple OS that mostly uses apps that rely on having an active internet connection. However, you can use some Google apps offline to do simple things like word processing, creating spreadsheets, and drawing simple pictures.

The Chromebook fits our needs perfectly. It is cheap and lightweight, so we can travel without worrying about it weighing us down or worry too much about it being lost or damaged. We discussed whether we wanted a more traditional laptop or a tablet and ultimately decided that the laptop would make it easier for us to compose the inspired prose of our blog posts. It has a webcam for the video chatting with people back home and also lets us sign in with our individual Google accounts so we can keep all our stuff separate (I’m picky about that for some reason). The build quality isn’t amazing but it’s pretty good for costing less than $300.

It’s hard to imagine what traveling would be like without this stuff. Obviously, people did without it all for decades, including myself when I traveled 10(!) years ago after college. I’ve read some articles that look down a bit on people that travel with technology and argue that it makes for a less complete or authentic travel experience. I think that’s completely ridiculous, though I do do sometimes wonder if it prevents us from making more personal connections with the people and places around us. Does having our devices at hand make us less likely to socialize? If we can just look up how to get somewhere online, would we be less likely to discus that kind of thing with our fellow travelers?

I think the answer to the first question is somewhere in the middle. Having our Kindles and whatnot with us has kept us entertained in our room, that’s for sure, but we have had plenty of interactions with people on our trip. We made a few friends along the way that we’ve traveled with and with whom we plan on keeping in touch. Our devices are really mostly there for the bus rides, the plane rides, the quiet nights in our lodging, and for those times when we want to connect with people back home. As far as the second question, our ability to use the internet to research our destinations has only expanded our options for travel, not diminished them, and allows us to evaluate and re-evaluate where we want to go and what we want to do. It lets us make sure we get what we need from these months on the road. I’m sure that some people probably do fall into the internet hole when they’re traveling, but our digital devices have largely served to enhance our experience.