Two Little Beauties!

When you go travelling on your bike, you want to minimise what you carry, right?

OK, maybe not the two little beauties you were thinking of!







There is never enough space in your saddlebags / bike luggage / tank-bag or rucksack. So, anything that means we can carry less stuff has got to be good. Maybe I am slow on the up-take, but I have just realised the benefits of mini USB cables. When in the USA I carry two phones with me – my UK mobile and my US cell phone. I need both, but I used to have to carry two different battery chargers with me, because the connectors are different.

I then realised that when on my 4 month bike tour I would be taking an external hard-drive which connects to my netbooks by a mini USB cable (you can see the red hard-drive and its cable in the photo below). I can connect my GoPro camera to the netbook with the same cable. It occurred to me that if I could find an adapter to connect my phones to the same USB cable, then I wouldn’t need to take my two phone chargers as well. I looked on the web and hey-presto, there are such connectors and they are tiny. I will therefore be taking these two little beauties with me. All that means I can connect my two phone, the external hard drive and the GoPro camera all with the same cable, or more likely in case I need to connect two at the same time, I will take two mini USB cables. Neat.

My big Nikon camera also connects to the netbook using the same mini USB cable to move pictures from the camera to the netbook, but I still need to take battery chargers for that Nikon and my point-and-shoot Sony camera. What I really need are cameras that ONLY need a USB cable for connecting AND charging and then I will be in minimum packing heaven!