Tech wins and losses from a week-plus of traveling abroad

And we’re back! After a week and a half abroad, I’ve returned, with that weird combination of tired and wistful that always seem to accompany the end of a trip. It’s good to be home, but I’ll miss traveling.

As I looked back over the last couple weeks, I found myself thinking about the ways that technology has improved the travel experience over the past many years.

There have been a lot of changes in tech since my first trip abroad in 2000, where I lugged along a PowerBook G3 and a relatively early Olympus digital camera. (I had to struggle to even find a compatible memory card reader when I was getting ready to leave!) These days, I rarely leave home without an iPhone and an Apple Watch, and for longer trips, I take either an iPad or MacBook along for the ride. Not to mention a slew of associated apps and accessories.

Overall, I think technology has helped make travel smoother and more pleasant, but that said, there are always a few things that remain a bit tricky. I figured it might be interesting to take a look at what I learned from this most recent adventure.

eSIM city

My mom always says that the only important things to remember when traveling are your wallet and your medications: everything else is replaceable. I’d add to that your smartphone: as long as my iPhone has access to the internet, I can handle pretty much anything else that life throws at me.

For most of my last twenty-plus years of international travel, I’ve favored grabbing a local SIM card for my smartphone. It usually has better service than staying on my home provider and it’s pretty much always substantially cheaper than my carrier’s international rates. As a result, I’ve amassed a ziplock bag full of plastic cards from a multitude of countries, ranging from as nearby as Canada to as far as India.

But I guess it’s time to toss those cards in the trash, because eSIMs are here and they make everything way easier. No longer do I have to dive into a local shop and sort through a bewildering array of options: instead, I just purchased a data-only eSIM with 5GB of data via the Airalo app before leaving home, turned off my AT&T service while I was on the plane over, and turned on the local line when landing. (There are, I should note, several other eSIM purveyors on the App Store; Airalo was simply the one I was recommended.)

While it was largely a simple process, the experience wasn’t quite seamless: I tried to activate the eSIM a couple days before I left, but without a local network to connect to it ended up in kind of a paused state; when I landed I had to flip the cellular data on and off for it to finally connect. After that point, it worked flawlessly, and Airalo even alerted me when I was about to run out of data and easily let me top up with more.

There was, however, one single caveat that prevented my eSIM experience from being as smooth as I’d like.

You can’t spell “iMessage” without “mess”

Ah, Messages. Why are you still so weird?

Despite improvements to Apple’s messaging system, using a different SIM abroad still holds the potential to throw a wrench in the works. I’ll caveat this complaint by saying, yes, I am running the iOS 18 beta on my phone, which could have caused some of my issues, but I’ve also run into similar problems in the past.

The main thorn here seems to be that much of iMessage is still linked to your phone number. That’s despite the fact that I’ve long set all of my devices to send messages from my email address—something that Apple has allowed since the earliest days of iMessage, but which never seems to work quite as well. At some level, it seems like iMessage still needs a phone number associated with it. And even though I got a data-only plan, using a different SIM meant that I was technically using a different phone number.

This meant I ended up with at least one group conversation where the other people saw messages about them removing and re-adding me to the group (without them doing anything), and I also had a couple cases where friends messaging me from home showed up with just their phone numbers instead of their names. Not dealbreakers, perhaps, but annoying nonetheless.

Upon my return home and the deactivation of my eSIM line, that one group conversation got even trickier as I started receiving notifications on one of my devices for messages I was sending. My attempt to remove the duplicate version of me then somehow removed the text entry box (and thus my ability to send messages) on some devices. Ultimately, I had to abandon that conversation thread and start a new one. Far from ideal.

Another issue I encountered—which isn’t Apple’s fault, I should say—was that the deactivation of my home phone line meant that I couldn’t receive SMS messages. (Nor does it seem that iOS 18’s support for the new RCS protocol changes that in any way, despite its ability to send messages over the data network—given that it’s still linked to your phone number.) Some of those texts seemingly disappeared into the ether, never to be seen again.

The lack of SMS was only really a problem in one instance, when I tried to sign up for a local parking app that required a phone number for verification. I tried a few approaches, including sending to a Google Voice Number, using a temporary number service online, and even eventually turning on my home cell line, sadly accepting the single-day international charge. Unfortunately, none of those things worked. This is the upside and downside of tech standards: SMS is universally accepted, yes, but it’s also old and tied to one particular way of doing things.

Pay as you go

At this point, I feel like Apple ought to co-opt the old VISA slogan—”It’s everywhere you want to be”—for Apple Pay. I think I reached for a physical credit card maybe twice during my trip, and had to scramble to find cash only a single time.

Of course, the real winner here is the contactless payment standard. The U.S. was slower to adopt it, though it’s come a long way in the past five years; in the UK, though, it’s ubiquitous: everything from a cafe in a remote town to the transit systems in London takes contacltess payments, which means never having to worry about exchange rates or ATM fees. ^{For transit in particular, just being able to tap my watch to get on and off was a delight—and as that system is shortly due to come to my hometown transportation system, I’m even happier.}

The one exception to all of this was the aforementioned parking incident. Since I couldn’t use that parking app, I ended up going down a rabbit hole to convert some old paper bills that I had, with no luck. Ultimately I just ended up withdrawing a handful of pounds from an ATM so that I could pay a parking meter. (Which didn’t even give change!) Frustrating, to be sure, but an isolated experience.

Get around, get around, I get around

I had great luck with Apple Maps while driving our rental car and taking public transit, but I particularly wanted to call out the latter in London. I managed to navigate several tricky train changes on the London transit system thanks to very clear and concise directions on both the iPhone and Apple Watch, spelling out which direction I would be going in, what platform I needed to be on, and so on. In fact, the only time I ended up going in the wrong direction was when I panicked last minute that Apple Maps was wrong (it wasn’t) and ran across the street to get on a different bus.

Having CarPlay available in our rental car was also clutch, even if it took a little while to figure out how to use the car’s own interface to turn it on. Being able to not only have access to all of our data—including music we’d downloaded before the trip—but in a familiar interface saved us a lot of time and trouble.

We did run into one small issue, though: the relatively new SharePlay feature of Music, which is supposed to allow multiple people in the car to manage the current playback queue, only allowed my wife to use it briefly before it kicked her out and wouldn’t let her reconnect. It may have been an issue with my phone running the iOS 18 beta, but it’s also never allowed her to automatically join the session—she’s always had to use the QR code. I’m honestly curious how many people use this feature and whether it’s generally wonky.

FaceTime: You know, for kids

Traveling with a small child is a special kind of vacation. ^{My two-year-old still takes a nap most afternoons and goes to bed before us, which meant that we were going to need a solution for watching him while we were out of the room. (Because if we are in the room, he will just want to talk to us and will never ever go to sleep.)}

So I packed our home baby monitor, the Eufy SpaceView Pro, which we often bring on trips. It’s an RF-based setup with a plug-in camera and a battery-powered display that’s served us pretty well…except that when it comes to hotels, the range is limited enough that we’d generally have to sit outside in the hall. Less fun than, say, going down to the lobby or hotel lounge.

During naptime, this problem turned out to be easy enough to solve. I just got my iPad on the hotel wi-fi, positioned it to see into the travel crib, and initiated a FaceTime call to my wife’s iPhone (which was on mute with the camera off). That way we could see and hear him while we got to sit in front of a nice fireplace or have afternoon tea.

At night, matters became more challenging. As good as night mode on Apple’s devices is, it doesn’t work on live video, so there was no way we were going to be able to see the kid in the dark.

However, our monitor has an infrared camera, which led me to exploit the good old analogue loophole: I set up the monitor’s camera, and then simply placed the iPad with its own camera facing the monitor’s display unit and did the same FaceTime trick. Voilà! Instant internet-enabled infrared camera.

This trick proved pretty reliable for the majority of our trip, excepting a few times where we had connectivity issues and I had to sneak in and restart the call. (At first I’d tried to use the ancient iPad Air 2 I had set up for my kid, but in the end it proved simpler to use my iPad Pro, overkill though it may have been.)

In the future I think I’d perhaps just grab a spare webcam with an infrared camera to make life easier all around.

Charge it

Of course, none of our devices are any good if we can’t charge them, but I’m relieved that this obstacle too has become much easier to hurdle. I mostly relied on a good old plastic adapter for UK plugs, along with my Anker multiport charger.

A few places we stayed had convenient USB ports, though only our relatively new London hotel had USB-C. Likewise, the car we drove had a USB-A port for charging. But I brought along enough cables in my travel bag for any and all of those eventualities, plus a couple backup batteries for topping up our devices when in need.

Overall, though I ended up running down my iPhone and Apple Watch most days, I never really ended up in a scenario where I couldn’t get power if I needed it, which helped me feel more comfortable and less anxious when it came to our travels.

Overall

The last thing you want when traveling is to have your reliance on technology make you more stressed, and I’m pleased to say that the state of the world is such that it generally smooths things over instead—and, in some cases, actually makes traveling even more of a joy. I appreciate that I can both stay connected to home and get the most of out the country I’m in.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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