Having flown over 2 million miles, I have had my share of travel experiences. I’ve also purchased and worked with a number of travel gadgets and gizmos, some good some bad. We’ve created this Travel Tech section to help our readers and we do not have any affiliation with these products nor do the manufacturers or distributors pay us. We simply write about what we believe in and what has helped us.
In thinking of travel tech, you would not ordinarily think about life saving devices. However, our first post is about a device that I can literally say saved me once.
I was traveling into Connecticut in a winter storm arriving well after midnight after a series of delays. I was happy to find my rental car attendant waiting for me.
After scraping the ice off the windows and warming up the car I started on what would normally be a 60-minute drive towards the hotel near our office. About one third of the way there I ran over a piece of plastic molding which punctured my tire making it immediately go flat. At this point I reached for my cell phone and saw that there was barely one bar of signal and only 10% battery left. All those calls to check flight delays, secure cars, and let hotels know I’d be coming late had used up the battery to almost nothing.
It was after 1am, I was on a desolate part of the highway, and the conditions were icy and treacherous to the point where one could not even walk on the shoulder. Hardly a car was to be found on the icy highway and there were deep woods all around. Not a good spot to be! After trying for over an hour to reach roadside assistance the battery failed and my car didn’t have a USB plug like many do nowadays to plug-in my charger.
Luckily I had my Energizer spare battery charger, which I had received as a gift from my thoughtful wife. I had charged it up months ago and had thrown it into my travel bag. At the time, I had not given much thought of how it could save me from spending the night in a dangerous spot on the highway or worse yet freezing to death or slipping to my demise in the middle of the night. As these thoughts went through my mind, I hoped that it would have a little charge left after all these months. It powered up still showing a full charge, which is normally enough for two full iPhone charges. Great news!
After charging a little I was once again able to get the phone working and get in touch with roadside assistance. They kept me waiting for hours (that’s another story) but having the phone charged allowed them to reach me and to find me and certainly made me feel safer on the side of the road.
We’re big believers that everyone should have one of these in his or her kit for emergencies. Check the charge every few months, but we find that unlike the cheap ones you get at the airport or as conference giveaways, the Energizer one keeps its charge for a long time.
You never know, it might save your life!
*Since this writing we have upgraded our aging battery (they do tend to lose their ability to keep charge after some years) with a couple of other devices. See our article:
Please note that we are not paid for this write-up, we simply want to share our findings in the fast moving field of travel tech and travel gear.