Tag: road tackle

I can't tell you how many times people have recommended I start carrying a portable black light with me on the road. Useful as it may be to detect those unmentionable mattress deposits left by former guests of motels I happen to stay at, I prefer not to think about it and just take a nice long shower in the morning.

If it's something you find just too jeebie to get past, though, I've come across an alternative you might want to look into. Called the TravelFresh Sleep Sack, it's like a full-body, cotton-blend condom made specifically for motel stays and designed to protect you from both foreign fluids and biting bedbugs.

Just slip it between the flat and fitted sheets and crawl inside. It measures 43 inches by 93 inches — larger than an average adult-size sleeping bag — but folds into a pouch no larger than a pair or two of socks. Plus, it features a built-in pocket into which you can slip a motel-provided pillow, so you don't have to schlep your own.

A razor that dispenses its own shaving cream and a toothbrush that applies its own toothpaste? I love technology.

With as much stuff as I have to lug with me on the road, I'm always looking for ways to lighten the load, or at least make things more compact. Enter ShaveMate's Titan 6 razor and the OHSO compact toothbrush.

The Titan, along with its stereotypically pink lady version, the Diva, eliminates the need to pack a bulky can of shaving cream by storing the foamy lubricant in its own handle. ShaveMate says the Titan holds enough cream for up to a week's worth of shaves. Plus, it's cheap: you can find a three-pack of the disposable razors for around $9.99.

Even niftier is the OHSO Travel Toothbrush. Available in a variety of colors, the OHSO is about the size of a Marks-A-Lot marker. Turn the knob on the end and it dispenses toothpaste directly into the bristles of the brush head, which is itself replaceable. ... Continued

Previously on the Roadside Resort, we took a look at the Wedge Alarm, a nifty little gadget that notifies you of unauthorized entry while you sleep in those sometimes less-than-ideal lodgings on the road.

If you're looking for a device that helps to prevent such entry in the first place, though, you might be interested in the Addalock by Rishon Enterprises. It's a pretty clever, compact bit of kit that uses a door's own strike-plate hole as a foothold against ingress.

Simply insert the silver bit into the hole, close the door and attach the red handle, and you've got a nice little buttress that appears to be more effective against busting open a door than those chintzy security chains still used by many cut-rate lodgings.

The Addalock retails for $19.99 and comes with a slim pouch that easily slips in the front pocket of your suitcase.

Long before there were digital cameras, even before there were one-hour photomats, families captured their road trips on stylish twin-lens reflex cameras like the old Yashika Mat and the popular Kodak Reflex, the type of cameras that were held at waist level and produced snapshots in a classic, square-frame format.

Such cameras can still be found in working condition at just about any junk shop and can add a terrific vintage twist to a good, old-fashioned road trip. Problem is, most of them take film formats that can be difficult to find and expensive to process.

But now you can get your hands on a nifty retro-style TLR that takes regular 35mm film like you can find just about anywhere. The Blackbird Fly, by designer Superheadz, takes photos in three formats — typical 35mm, full-frame or square — and can be had with a face plate in black, white, teal, orange, yellow or red. It goes for a little over $100. ... Continued

If you're one of those hard-core road trippers who drives hard and tries to hit so many attractions in one day that you occasionally have to pull over and take a nap on the side of the road, this could be the accessory for you.

The Take Me Anywhere Suitcase Pillow, designed by Etsy user Olive, is the perfect detourist's snooze pillow in both style and function. Designed to look like a snazzy piece of luggage, it features a handle for carrying, and can even be ordered with a custom luggage tag so you and your navigator can keep straight whose pillow is whose.

Tool blog Toolmonger has just turned me on to a nifty little gadget that could offer many of us road-trip enthusiasts a better sense of security on the road. Called the Wedge Alarm, it's a simple little 110dB noisemaker that's designed to fit temporarily under the edge of a door or window and notify a room's occupants of any unauthorized entry.

Now, it won't do anything to keep burglars from making off with your luggage while you're out of your motel room, but as someone who has stayed in some pretty sketchy places, I can say that I would certainly sleep a little sounder in certain motels with this thing wedged under the door.

According to Google, you can pick this one up, or a model similar to it, for as little as around $4.

Sure, you can rely on the motel wake-up call if you want to, but I personally prefer a backup. If I oversleep and miss the golden hour because some lobby jockey didn't set the time right, the rest of my day is shot.

The problem is, nearly all travel alarm clocks are either too gimmicky or just plain junk. But I may have found the perfect bedside buzzer in Industrial Facility's Jetlag.

The Jetlag does exactly and only what a travel timepiece should. The display, split in half, shows both the current time and the alarm time, all the time, so there's never any question what it's set to. Plus, each half has its own +/- button, making it almost impossible to screw things up. A switch on the underside allows you to lock the settings, so you can't accidentally change them.

The design is so simple, it's rendered an instruction manual completely unnecessary and has almost entirely eliminated the possibility of setting the alarm incorrectly while exhausted, and possibly drunk, in a foreign environment. ... Continued

Detourists with an unhealthy nostalgia for the '80s will soon be able to live out their Hasselhoff fantasies (no, not those fantasies) thanks to the GPS gadget developer Mio Technology.

Apparently, Mio has recently bought out Knight Industries, as they will soon be releasing their Knight Rider-inspired GPS unit in an apparent attempt to capture the direction-sense-challenged dork market.

Not only does the new navigation unit feature a black Trans Am as the locator icon and greet you by saying, "Hello, Michael. Where would you like to go today?" and come with red lights reminiscent of KITT's Anamorphic Equalizer, but it speaks using the original voice of KITT himself, William Daniels.

There's no definite release date yet, but sources have it the unit will retail for about $300.

Let's just hope it plays the awesome theme music, too. ... Continued