Foster on Vacation in British Columbia
Two biggest issues: Power and Wireless Access
Power:
You can have the very best gadgets in the world but if they don’t have enough power; they are just added weight to lug through TSA, Customs and Airports. I carried my MacBook Pro laptop and got pretty good battery out of it until I started really using it, e.g. to watch a movie that I had downloaded from iTunes. When I got to Seattle airport the battle was to find an outlet! A cagey 20 something girl found the only available outlet in a dining area and I was about to dispair since both my laptop and iPhone were running out of power. Then I got to Alaska airlines for my connecting flight and found that there were extra power outlets in almost ALL the seats in the waiting area.
I was not so lucky on the ferry ride back to Seattle. There were many outlets…but all were taken. During the extra long 5 hour ride I nearly ran out of battery on my iPhone 4 which seemed to go really quickly. This was critical because I needed to change my flight because of weather delays. Not very impressed with the iPhone 4 battery life.
Wireless Connection:
First, a word of warning: when leaving the US, put your phone on AirPlane mode so that it will not automatically hook up to the local phone networks (Telus and Rogers in Canada on Vancouver Island) Without knowing it you can accumulate breathtaking charges for data and calls. My wife managed to call me twice briefly when I got off the plane in Canada because I had turned off the AirPlane mode when I got off the plane.
My sister, fortunately had an excellent wireless signal and I was able to use Skype to call home, surf the Net etc. I even found that there were free WiFi connections in many restaurants and coffee shops. But I had to be very careful not to allow Rogers to hook up to my phone. I think that connecting to WiFi in Canada is just about as easy as in the US unlike other neighboring nations on the continent.