I just got back from another family visit, this time to upstate New York. I was well out of Irene’s path and except for a rainy Sunday wasn’t affected at all—I thought. Upstate New York wasn’t affected but New York City certainly was: JFK shutdown causing 1600 flight cancellations.
I’ve written before about traveling with an iPad as my only computer but this time I had to completely rearrange my travel itinerary. I was flying out of Syracuse and there were no flights to Tampa so I had to fly to Orlando. That meant arranging for a rental car to drive to Tampa from Orlando. Because the flight left early, I booked a room near the airport so my family wouldn’t have to get up at 3:30 to make the hour and a half drive to Syracuse.
I’m happy to report that I was able to all this easily with the iPad. I had to call the airline directly to rebook the flight and I just entered the new information into FlightTrack Pro manually and pushed it to Tripit. I made the car and motel reservations on line and forwarded the email confirmations to Tripit. When I finished, I had the new itinerary in Tripit complete with confirmation codes and other essential information. All of that was mirrored automatically to my iPhone for instant reference when needed.
As it happens, my family has WiFi but even if they didn’t, the broadband connectivity on my iPad would have enabled me to do all this. For that matter, I suppose I could have done it all on my iPhone but the iPad certainly made for a more pleasant experience.
This was only the second time I’ve traveled with just my iPad but after this trip I feel pretty comfortable doing so. I missed Emacs and my development environment but I probably wouldn’t have used them anyway. I shudder to think what a nightmare making a new itinerary would have been without my iPad and a few key apps like FlightTrack Pro and Tripit. The only phone call I had to make was to the airline (with a 30 minute wait for a representative). Everything else was handled quickly and easily on-line.