Gadgets

These are some of the things I am taking on my trip. If you decide to finish your bachelor's degree in 29 years, and then ride around the country, some of this stuff may be helpful.



Thank you Carolyn for suggesting GPS! Carolyn (C-zookie, "Suzuki" - get it?) has a ton of riding experience. Yes, one ton. She has taken rides across the USA, circled the whole darn country, and zigzagged her way all over the place, and is still out there riding and exploring lots of places.



Although I won't be using GPS to find my way around, I will be using it to track my location and progress. I like old-school-crumpled paper maps. And I will mapquest some, too. And I have gotten lost a time or two and had to ask someone where in the heck I was. So I decided to go with instamapper.com. They provide free GPS tracking. I bought a prepaid Boost Mobile Motorola i290 phone at Target. Normally 49.99, but I just happen to get it on sale for 29.99. Target has a 90-day return policy that may come in handy when I finish my trip, because I may need 29.99 worth of food. The phone comes with $5 of service which is good for 3 months, and will be more than adequate for my use. If I use the phone for the same purpose at a later date, I will have to buy more time. I won't be using the phone to make calls, but it has a GPS chip in it - as do most newer phones. After setting it up, instamapper.com tracks the point-to-point location coordinates, progress and speed. Oh, it is illegal to use this device to track someone without their permission.



But let's say someone is curious of the whereabouts of a friend or loved one. The phone could be placed in the trunk of a car, and then you watch online to see if the car is fooling around somewhere that it should not be. But, this is illegal, so don't try it.



And, of course if you have kids under 18 you could place the phone in the trunk and see them drive all over the place. I don't know if you require your children's permission to spy on them, but don't do it anyway, because it may be illegal. But it would be fun to watch someone drive around town while they are shopping and, then, all-of-the-sudden, hey, why did they go over there? I guess you could call them later and innocently ask, did I leave my phone in your car? And the phone can be hard-wired to the car's battery and be used as a full-time tracking device, so that if someone decides to drive your car without permission, you could see how creative they are when they try to get away in your stolen car. OK, enough of this. Have fun, but be nice.



Some other gadgets I will use are: a small solar panel to power my laptop, 2 solar chargers for my phones, a solar-powered rechargeable battery charger, and a solar-powered/hand crank AM/FM/Weather band radio, flashlight combo. I will have the solar stuff strapped to the outside of my bags and connected to the gadgets so they will stay charged. This will work just fine as long as the sun keeps shining. But if it decides to hide from me for a few days, I have 2 quick-charge battery chargers, and regular AC phone chargers that I can plug in somewhere along the way. And if the sun stops shining completely, then all of us will have much more challenging issues.