In this video, Evan Carmichael shares how he relied on his iPad as his sole computing device during a recent vacation, replacing a laptop and streamlining his travel experience. He walks through eight specific apps and use‑cases that solved common travel pain points: DJ/iPod for in‑car music after a car stereo failure; Evernote for pre‑loaded city guides and offline note access; Sleep Pillow to replace a forgotten toddler sound machine; a streamlined Mail workflow that avoids costly cruise‑ship Wi‑Fi; Instapaper and Zeit for offline reading without heavy books; interactive eBooks to keep a 2‑year‑old entertained; the native Maps app for navigation and local assistance; and GarageBand for creative downtime while avoiding addictive games. For each app he explains the problem, how the iPad solved it, any cost considerations, and the overall impact on the trip. He concludes that traveling light with an iPad made the vacation more enjoyable, freeing him from a laptop and encouraging future iPad‑centric trips.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael, and welcome to another video. Usually in these videos I talk about famous entrepreneurs and the lessons that you can learn from their success. Today I'm going to take a slightly different approach, and I'm going to talk about my iPad. I just came back from a vacation, and I used my iPad as my main computer. Computing device instead of bringing my computer, and it saved my vacation. I want to talk about all the different ways that I used it and hopefully tell you about a couple apps that you haven't heard of and how you might be able to use it for your next trip as well. So here we go. App number 1: DJ or iPod. Driving from Toronto to New York is about a 9-hour trip depending on delays at the border, and it can get really boring if you don't have music. My wife and I have a tradition of making a new CD full of songs every time we travel. Unfortunately, once we crossed into Buffalo, we stopped at a plaza and I left the car lights on. I killed our battery. We got a new battery installed, but our stereo system has an anti-theft mechanism that if you change the battery, the stereo gets disabled unless you have the unlock code. We didn't have it on us, which meant no music for the rest of our trip. Enter DJ or iPod. Luckily, I had loaded my songs onto my iPad as well before we left. We had music for the rest of our trip. The iPad batteries were awesome and the speaker was pretty good in the car. We found the best spot to put the iPad was in the sun visor with the speaker pointing down. I bought the DJ app because I'm also a salsa DJ in my part-time. It's the best app I know that I've seen for mixing songs and hosting parties, but the native iPod app would have done the trick just as well, and it's free. App #2: Evernote. Evernote is a cool tool that lets you store notes and pictures online and access them from any device. I've used it in the past to go paperless and get rid of all my paper receipts after I watched a video on YouTube. I never really used it for anything beyond keeping track of my receipts, but this vacation provided a perfect opportunity to test it out. Before going away, I loaded my desktop version of Evernote with information on each city that we'd be visiting. I put in places we should visit, information about where we would be docking, and a little bit of history about the city. It automatically synced with my Evernote app on my iPad. Whenever we landed in a new city, I had all the information at my fingertips. The basic app is free, but if you want to be able to have the information available offline, then you need to upgrade for $4.99 a month or $44.99 a year. I know some entrepreneurs who store every idea they have on Evernote and use it as an integral part of their business. I'll definitely be looking at other ways to incorporate it into my daily life after the great experience from this trip. App number 3: Sleep Pillow. My son is a little over 2 years old and is used to sleeping with a sound machine that helps drown out any background noise. Unfortunately, in our haste to leave, we forgot his sound machine at home. There must be an app for that. Enter Sleep Pillow. With this app, you can choose from a large selection of sounds to help you fall asleep, from water falling to chimes to spa music. Our favorite was the electric fan. It worked like a charm And when you're traveling with a 2-year-old, nothing beats a good night's sleep. App number 4: Mail. When you're traveling on a cruise ship, connecting to the internet can cost upwards of $1 per minute. In the past, my wife and I would connect using Microsoft Outlook, download our emails, disconnect, respond to the emails, reconnect, and send so we're not spending hundreds of dollars on slow cruise ship Wi-Fi. This time I took a different approach. I connected my email to my iPad, and when we landed in a new city, would find a local Starbucks and connect to download my email. After dinner, back on board the ship, I would load up the emails, respond, and the next day connect again in a new city to send the emails and download new ones. It was unbelievably freeing to not have to load my laptop to get my emails and to be able to reply at my leisure. App number 5: Instapaper and Zeit. Usually when I go on vacation, I pack a lot of books and magazines as reading material. This time my goal was to pack everything I needed for the entire 2-week trip in one backpack and carry it with me. Books and magazines are heavy, so they couldn't come with me. Enter Instapaper. Instapaper was actually the first app I bought when I got my iPad. What it allows you to do is clip articles that you read online and save them to read offline later. You can install a little button on your browser, and whenever you see something that you want to read but don't have the time yet, click the button, it'll save it, and you you can read it offline on your iPad whenever you want. I get a lot of my reading material from the RSS feeds that I subscribe to in Google Reader, and Instapaper has built-in intelligence to work with Google Reader, so it's a seamless process. I also get my news from Zeit, which is free, which has Instapaper integration. As part of my daily routine in Toronto, I'll go through my Google Reader and Zeit while I eat breakfast and save anything that's interesting to Instapaper. Then I'll read it on my iPad as I walk to and from work. Before leaving on this trip, I loaded up my Instapaper with lots of reading material from blogs that I follow, and when I connected to send emails, I often loaded up my Zeit to save any interesting articles as well. It gave me lots of reading material to go through offline while relaxing on a deck chair on the cruise ship and beat carrying around heavy books and magazines with me everywhere. App number 6: Interactive ebooks for kids. For those of you who travel with kids, I would definitely recommend checking out some of the interactive ebooks you can install on your iPad. We don't let our son watch TV yet, and we didn't have space to bring all his books, so I downloaded a number of ebooks that he thoroughly enjoyed while we were away. They were educational and also a great way to calm him down when he was getting too tired or worked up. There are many options out there, but you have to sort through them to find the good ones that are age-appropriate. My 2-year-old son's favorites were The Monster at the End of the Book, Thomas and Friends, Mickey's Spooky Night puzzle book, and The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. They all teach reading skills and interactive and allow your kids to explore books in a whole new way, as well as give their parents some time to relax. App number 7: Maps. When traveling in the past, I used to get a map of each place we were visiting, research all the spots I wanted to visit, and and mark them on a map. The map would usually start to wear down on me with all the folding and unfolding throughout the course of the day. If we wanted to find something that I didn't mark on the map, we had to ask the locals and hope they gave us the right directions. Enter the native Maps app. Maps is automatically installed on your iPad and saved me so many times on this trip. It can automatically detect where you are in a city and you can quickly see where you have to go. Seeing it on the big screen was so much more helpful than on the iPhone, especially when you're in a city as big as New York and you want to cover a lot of territory. We used it to plan our subway routes, look up sushi restaurants, see how far away we were from our car, find our cruise ship, and the list went on. My favorite use was when I was shopping in a drugstore in New York City and a grandmother with her baby grandchild asked me if there was a Walgreens anywhere nearby. My Toronto Blue Jays hat didn't tip her off that I wasn't a local. I pulled up my iPad, searched Walgreens in Maps, and showed her that there was one 2 blocks away and how to get there. She was floored and it made her day. App #8: GarageBand. I purposely removed any games I had on my iPad. I tried many of them out for a month and found them to be overly addictive and counterproductive. Better to delete them completely and not be tempted. But I found myself sometimes wanting to have some fun in my downtime instead of reading. Enter GarageBand. I started using GarageBand when YouTube was giving me issues with having background music in my videos. Even though I had the rights to use the music. I'm currently uploading about 5 videos per week on my YouTube channel, and each one of them was a battle with YouTube over the music rights. So I decided to create my own music, and I used GarageBand to do it. The music you hear in the background of this video was created by me in GarageBand. So when I found myself wanting to have a little more fun, I cranked open GarageBand and started composing with earphones on so as not to disturb the rest of my family. It's a great way to kill boredom but do something that's somewhat practical instead of playing games. At least that's what I told myself. In conclusion, the trip was made so much easier and more enjoyable because of the iPad. We had music, we could travel lightly, we could sleep, we knew where we were going, and we had a lot more fun. Being able to travel without having to use my computer was so liberating. I can't imagine ever going back and can't wait for my next trip. Thank you for joining me for another video. If you guys liked it, please give it a thumbs up below. I'd also love to hear your thoughts and feedback if you want to leave a comment under the video. And stay tuned for the next episode.
