It's the day after my birthday and I officially start the first day of my 2012 holidays. I took a few days in the summer but not since this time last year have I had an extended period of being able to not have to pay constant attention to the day job. I need it, Eleanor and the kids need it - even the house needs it. On one hand, it seems like a mighty long time to wait, on the other, what better time than Christmas to be able to kick back and chew things over. After dropping the kids off at school this morning, on the drive home I decided that I would change a few things - the biggest one being to spend less time online. It crossed my mind that I probably spend far too much time attached to wifi. I might even be a hotspot for others I spend so much of my time there. It strikes me that I need to rejoin the human race at least for a little while but the real reason is that I need to write more without distractions. Sure - there's tools you can use to cock-block the web while you're working on your machine but I am not to be trusted. There's iTunes to mess with and all kinds of garbage that I can be distracted by on here... I'm going to see how it pans out without kicking myself in the head if I fail. It is, at least, a plan.
Slightly related to that subject, but not really, yesterday I ran through the blog of Neil Strauss. It's good fun but somehow I found myself clicking through to a site where some dude had detailed his 'digital nomad' gear kit. A digital nomad is, apparently, somebody who works out in the world without a permanent base. This can be a traveller of the world or even somebody that works from home or a cafe etc. I fall somewhere in between these two things. If you check in here often, you'll know that I hate travelling heavy. The lighter I can travel, the better I feel about a trip, so I did the pointy clicky thing and went to see what the kit lit looked like. And here it is with an update of the older list for this year here.
And while that was all very interesting, I thought to myself that aside from my books and vinyl collection, that's actually more stuff than I own. So I thought I might make a better list - along with some thoughts. I guess if you're going on an extended trip, you might need to add some bits, but for short break - even for periods up to a month, I think my list is far superior. Here we go.
When I went to Colorado a little while back - which is something like 7000 miles and therefore classed as 'far away', here's what I had on my original list:
And that was pretty much it apart from the clothes I was wearing. I considered taking the iPad but what does it do that this doesn't. Sure it's a bit smaller but I've trained myself to work small for a long time now for these very reasons. Is watching episodes of Grimm going to be less enjoyable on a small screen? Nope. Hell, at one time, I used to watch movies on my iPod - the one that looks like an After Eight mint (was that the original nano?) and that's tiny. I can read a book perfectly happily on the phone too - with iBooks and the kindle app on there, I sure didn't need anything else. I pre-loaded with a few audiobooks just to make sure. Loaded a couple of thousand songs and well, that was me pretty ready to roll out of the door.
I set the phone up to sweep photos and video into dropbox when I hit wifi spots, that was pretty flawless. The camera and video utilities are more than good enough for what I use them for and anything I really needed could be pulled down from there or any of the other spaces I have online for digital storage. I have an external hard drive, but that's for disaster recovery not playing with and at no point did it ever cross my mind to take the MacBook. Those things are heavy. Before I went, I also tested out the voice memo facility for interviews - and again, flawless. What the hell is that kit list from hell about? I dropped it in my jacket pocket and I was ready to roll - and yeah, in the other pocket was the charger. I've also got one of these that negates the need for a wallet too:
Now, my plan was to go in the clothes I was wearing and buy things like socks, pants, toothpaste, shampoo - you know all that stuff that's essential - when I got there because something that a lot of people seem to forget is that... wait for it... there are stores all over the world where the people that live there shop! It's amazing. The idea then is to dump it all before you come home so you don't have to carry it back. Wasteful? Not really. Not if you shop smartly and it's not like there are no people not in need of this stuff everywhere around the world.
This great plan was thrown into turmoil however when more than one person suggested that it might look suspicious getting on a plane to the States with no luggage. I'm not sure how true this is but I ended up taking a bag. This bag from Scaramanga. I put some shirts in, some underwear, a book (but only because I was taking a damn bag) and that was about it. The good thing about a bag like that is that you don't need to check it in and therefore don't have to wait for the luggage carousel - well, technically. My travel partner James had a case, so I ended up waiting for him waiting for his case, but the theory is solid.
If you think hard about what it is you'll be doing when you get there, how you want to entertain yourself and what kind of business you need to do (if any), you too will probably find that any old smartphone will be enough. Just don't lose your phone!
As part of an ongoing purge of garbage in my life, I've also thrown out at least 30 apps from the phone that seemed like a good idea at the time. There were maybe only 40 on there anyway. I've tried every kind of 'word processor' out there on the phone and the pad from Pages right down to well, you name it, I've tried it. Nothing comes close to Evernote. Nothing. Do yourself a favour and sign up to a premium account with them. If you need to work on the road, this is all you'll ever need. Then do yourself another favour and believe that you really can write a novel using only an iPhone.
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..and now, I am going to find a coffee shop with no wifi. Me and my notebook have things to do. I'll leave you with Dave: