In our travels along The Scenic Route we’ve found a few items that have made our time on the road a good bit easier.
Topping that list has been our Apple iPad Mini, which has helped us do everything from finding a campground for tonight and scoping out tomorrow’s driving route to checking the weather forecast and emailing photos to the folks back home. While the six must-have apps for RVers we reviewed a few weeks back play a big part in making our iPad Mini more useful, we’ve also found a few pieces of hardware we that give it some added versatility.
While the iPad Mini is small enough to stash in a door pocket or the center console of our pickup, we’ve found the specially-designed mounting solutions from RAM Mounting Systems keep our little tablet close at hand. With it mounted in the cab so it’s always at our fingertips, it makes it just that much easier to look up fuel prices at nearby stations or what fast food choices are available at the next few freeway exits.
While the iPad Mini’s battery life is quite good, we often forget to top it off overnight. We found a couple of good solutions to this problem from the folks at Zagg. The ZaggSparq is a palm-size battery pack with two USB charging ports and enough juice for four full battery charges for both the iPad Mini and our iPhones, which makes it perfect if we find ourselves dry-camping for a couple of days. If we’re in the truck, the UniqueCharge offers a single USB port that plus into the 12-volt cigarette lighter-style outlet.
When we move from the truck to our Kodiak 300BHSL trailer for the night, we pop the iPad Mini into the ZaggKeys Mini 7, a combination protective case, stand and Bluetooth keyboard that makes sending emails or web searches much more comfortable than trying to peck out a long-winded missive on the iPad Mini’s on-screen keyboard.
While the iPad Mini is a great piece of hardware in itself, adding these few accessories makes it just that much better for RV travel.
