Leaving on a jet plane
It's a truly noxious feeling: You are roused from a perilous upright slumber by a wayward drinks cart bashing into your elbow on its way to Row 24 of Economy. Shivering in your scratchy blanket, you wipe the drool from your chin and glance at the flickering screen on the seat-back in front of you. Flight time remaining: 6 hours 23 minutes. Welcome to long-haul hell.
Surviving this airborne Hades requires careful preparation. You will need to provide your own entertainment. In-flight multimedia offerings may have come a long way, but the plane trip when you forget your MP3 player will be the trip when your personal TV malfunctions, leaving you to spend 13 hours amusing yourself with puppets fashioned from the tinfoil lid of your inedible dinner.
Here are the entertainment essentials to get you through the arduous journey.
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Nabbing a pair of these babies and plonking them on your noggin is the best way of separating yourself from quotidian reality without enforcing cranked-up music upon others.
They don't have to cost you a mint--while Bose's QuietComfort 3 market leaders are a hefty investment, the Jabra C820s are almost as good for a quarter of the price.
Those precious but irritating-as-all-get-out squealing infants who seem to be present on every flight to London/LA/Singapore? Seal yourself in your headphone cocoon, and the little blighters disappear off your annoyance radar. You can even drift off to sleep to the soft strains of Vivaldi, sans the background engine noise. And for skittish flyers who interpret every mechanical noise as a sign of impending death-by-airborne-inferno, you can just sit back quietly quaffing shiraz, because you won't be hearing those clunks and whirrs anymore.
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The importance of the MP3 player has already been established, but you'll need to make sure its battery life can withstand multi-leg air journeys and unforseen delays.
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A great way to get revved up for your adventures and kill time mid-flight is to read guidebooks on your destination. The teched-up version of this time-honored practice? Listening to travel podcasts and scrolling through city guides on your iPod.
To find a podcast about your destination, try browsing through the Places & Travel category (found within Society & Culture) in the podcast section of the iTunes Store, or searching for the name of the city. Beware though--if you're heading to Paris, you'll get a heap of Ms Hilton's musical mediocrity in your search results.
A handy application is PodCityGuides, which offers guides for several hundred cities. These work like a podcast in that the guides will be updated whenever you connect your iPod. The software is independent of iTunes, and won't mess with your music library.
