Advice for traveling at home or abroad with a laptop:
how to carry, protect and power your computer

Here’s our reasoning for carrying a laptop and our experience so far with 57 days on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route and a 120-day SE Asia bike tour.

Why We Carry a Laptop

Apple StoreDave is a photographer who gives slide show presentations and sells prints in addition putting photos on this site, so he wanted the ability to Photoshop his pictures and have a backup for the memory cards. I wanted a good keyboard for writing and reviewing my posts, and I wanted to be able to adjust the css, layout, and graphics for the site. We also thought we might want to listen to music now and then, and we have an extensive mp3 collection in iTunes. We wanted a smallish laptop with wireless capabilities. We already had Dave’s Dell Inspiron 9300 and my Apple 13″ Macbook. We chose the Macbook because it was much smaller and lighter. I think most of these recommendations would also apply to smaller PC laptops if that’s what you’re comfortable with.

Our Notebook: The Details

Our 13″ Macbook weighs 5 lbs and is pretty slim at about an inch thick. It is compact but still has a great keyboard. It was the least expensive Apple laptop at around $1,100 in the summer of 2006, but offered a solid 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor with 1GB Ram.

Apple Online StoreNow Apple has come out with the Macbook Air, weighing 3 pounds with more RAM and drive space than my Macbook. If I were buying now I’d seriously consider the Air model. I had a chance to drool on one at the Apple Store here and it looks beautiful.

We find that the Apple wireless is really quick to pick up any available wifi signal, faster than Dave’s Dell laptop if we walk into a coffee shop or something together, and is really simple and user friendly in just about every way. We found free wireless in almost every small town along the Great Divide, making it so that we didn’t have to use libraries or plug into ethernet anywhere. It really was incredibly convenient. Free wireless was harder to come by in SE Asia, so we used the laptop to do the processing/writing work and transferred files to a USB flash drive to use in internet cafes for security reasons (read more about that below).

Carrying the Laptop

Most laptop cases are heavy and bulky, but I bought a Waterfield Laptop Sleeve custom made for my MacBook 13” laptop. It was just enough padding and water-resistance protection without taking up too much space. Good options I’d now recommend are the REI E-Wrap Small Computer Sleeve, the Tucano MB Sleeve, and the GYMSPacific MacBook Poppy Sleeve (cute!). You can throw these minimal sleeves into a backpack if you’re on foot or right into a bike pannier. If it’s raining, you can also easily fit the laptop into a 2-gallon ziplock before or after putting it in the sleeve.

Dave carried the laptop in its sleeve in his front Ortlieb (waterproof) pannier with a few books and odds and ends. He would cinch down the top of the pannier and it all fit pretty snugly, but keep in mind we were on rocky, bumpy dirt roads and trails for nearly 2500 miles on the Great Divide. The laptop worked perfectly and did not seem to be any worse for wear after all the bumping and rattling. I think a lot of it had to do with the tight-fitting sleeve and really solid laptop construction. Updated to add: after SE Asia, all is still well! I’m working on the same laptop back in the U.S. right now.

How International Travel Is Different

We carried our Macbook with us on the SE Asia tour and had to deal with some additional challenges compared to our Great Divide bike tour. Here’s what we added to the kit and how it worked out:

  • We added a Kensington International All-in-One Travel Plug Adapter. Most laptop power supplies take 110-240V, so the adapter just has all the different plug types which retract into the unit. This adapter worked perfectly, is about as small as it could be, and looks like it will perform through several more international trips.
  • We also added a Tripplite Traveler Laptop Surge Protector for inconsistent rural power sources. Unfortunately, I didn’t check to see that it would work with 240V power, which it didn’t, so it is something to be used in the U.S. We could really have used one in a few places in SE Asia, so I’d like to do more research to find one that will work for future trips.
  • Because wireless is harder to find in SE Asia, we brought the Kingston DataTraveler 4GB USB Flash Drive. This allowed us to do our photo processing and writing on the laptop any time we wanted and then transfer the files to the flash drive to quickly upload to the website at an internet cafe. This turned out to be hugely convenient, as many of them didn’t allow people to plug laptops in with ethernet cables. Also, by using Firefox Portable we could browse the internet securely, even do internet banking, and leave no trace on the shared computers. Be careful if you use this setup with a PC laptop: we picked up viruses on the flash drive at almost every internet cafe. If we had then plugged it into our own PC laptop we’d have been in sorry shape. However, one nice thing about using an Apple (at least for now) is that hardly any viruses are made to attack Apples.