I remember being able to count my must-pack travel items on two fingers: as long as I had my passport and my wallet, I felt good to go.
How times have changed. On a recent holiday to Italy, I found myself packing almost as many electrical items as I did clothes. Odd, as the idea behind the holiday was to take a break from my usual gadget-infested lifestyle.
Off the top of my head, my fiancée and I had an iPad, a Kindle, a Nikon D5000 DSLR, a FujiFilm point-and-shoot camera as a backup, our BlackBerry smartphones, a TomTom sat-nav, my Garmin GPS sports watch, a pair of audio-canceling headphones, and of course, a myriad of chargers for many of the aforementioned. All that, and we were only staying in Rome for a week.
Granted, most items were used, but it got me thinking - which gadgets would we class as essential? It's obviously going to depend on where you're going and for what purpose (my kit list lengthens dramatically for a work-related trip), but out of all the gadgets we packed, I could easily have left half-a-dozen behind. The BlackBerry, Nikon and TomTom being my must-have items.
That brings us neatly onto our question of the week: which gadgets do you travel with? And are there any that you deem to be essential, or are you happy to make do with a good ol' paperback? Let us know and share your thoughts in the HEXUS forums.
