I consider myself an avid planner when it comes to my travels. Sometimes I would venture to say that I am a serious overplanner. So why I left checking that all of my electronic devices were compatible with each other until 2 days before I left is a bit of a mystery to me. But leave it I did, and here is why it turned into an EPIC FAIL.

1. A few months ago I bought a new camera. I upgraded from a Canon EOS550D to a Canon EOS70D. I hadn’t actually downloaded any photos from it yet though. 2 days from departure I decided to give it a go. Turns out my version of my photo editing software, Adobe Lightroom 4.4, wasn’t compatible with my new camera. Fail #1. I had 2 options, upgrade to Lightroom 6 for $99 or download the free image converter Adobe DNG Converter to convert my photos, making them acceptable for Lightroom 4.4. I went with the first option.
2. So I upgraded to Lightroom 6, paid, and installed it. Or attempted to install it. It wasn’t far into the process that I received an error message advising that Lightroom 6 required a 64 bit computer to run on. My little Asus Transformer was a 32 bit. Fail #2
3. $99 down the drain, I attempted option 2, and downloaded the DNG Converter. Downloaded fine, watched an online tutorial on how to use it, so far so good. Logged into the converter and selected 7 photos to test the conversion. Converting, waiting, comverting, waiting. It took 3 minutes to convert a single photo. This was not going to work. There was no way I could work with software that took 3 minutes per photo, considering the thousands of photos I was likely to take. Fail #3
4. Disheartened, and now into Sunday, the day before I was due to depart, I headed out to find a new laptop to take with me. At first I considered going Mac and getting a Macbook Air. I’ve never used a Mac before though, and didn’t fancy learning it on the fly while away. I also wasn’t sure that MS Office was compatible, and I have some pretty complex spreadsheets that I’ve created to track my budget. I ended up with a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, and what a beauty it is.
5. I spent the rest of the day setting up my new love. Install AVG anti-virus software. Check. Install Lightroom 6. Check (phew). Install iTunes. Check. Install Skype. Check. Install MS Office. Check? Uh oh. My MS Office is rather old and on disk, but I’d not wanted to upgrade and pay more. The Surface (and the Asus before it) did not have a disk drive, so I had purchased a $79 external disk drive and installed successfully on the ASUS. Turns out, this little external drive was not compatible with the Surface. Fail #4. Gah!! I bit the bullet and paid the $89 for MS Office 365.

I’m sure there’s some pretty big learnings in there for anyone going overseas (or anywhere really). Don’t expect all of your gear to be compatible. And to think, if I’d just kept the Canon EOS550D I would have been fine.

On the plus side, I’m loving this Surface. Lightweight, easy to use, with a touch screen (and a touch pen!) and I got the very pretty purple keyboard, because how it looks is surely as important as how it works.