Mid April, IPad

In our previous trips we have been a bit weighed down by books and maps.  When we first started touring Europe ages ago in 2005, to communicate with our family back in Australia, we used to use the one guest computer that some hotels had, and if that was not available, then stopped in an internet café.

On later trips we have found that wireless (WiFi) is becoming more and more common, and we have been able to ring home for free using Skype on my Iphone.

So for this trip, we thought we would become even more sophisticated and look at whether we could load stuff onto an IPad.  The latest model, version 2, is considerably lighter than the original and it would not take much for it to turn out to be lighter than the books we would otherwise carry.

 The first books we need are Lonely Planets.  Roz in particular uses these extensively and they seem to fit our style of travel well.  Fortunately they are available in PDF format, (the same as our book) which means that while this is not a native format for the IPad, it works well.

Lonely Planet sell their books by the chapter, which is slightly inconvenient, and I still have to work out how to store  these chapters in some sort of folder.

 The only trick, is that instead of using Apple’s IBook application you do the following:

 Buy and download the PDF files to your computer.  Then drag and drop the PDF onto the Itunes icon.  That’s it.

 We will also load some other stuff onto the device, perhaps some novels and accommodation directories to further decrease the weight.  We have access to Google maps amongst others at night through WiFi, and this should help, although it is no substitute for having a paper map in front of you during the day.