Travel Tech: The Setup I Use to Work Remotely for a Month

I spent 34 days working across Italy — real client work, not a vacation with a laptop open for show — with a baby in tow. The constraint forces honesty: every device in the bag had to earn its place, because I was carrying it through train stations with a stroller in the other hand. Here's what made the cut.

The laptop: fanless, all-day, silent

An M5 MacBook Air (32GB). Fanless matters more than you'd think when you're working from a tiny apartment with a sleeping baby ten feet away — zero noise, no heat, and it runs a full work day on battery so I rarely carried the charger during the day. For data work, the 32GB of unified memory handled everything I throw at it locally. (I keep the heavy compute on my local AI fleet back home and reach it remotely rather than hauling a heavier machine.)

Connectivity: assume the Wi-Fi will fail

Accommodation Wi-Fi fails at exactly the wrong moment — usually the one call that actually mattered. The fix is redundancy:

• eSIM (Airalo, or your carrier's international day-pass) loaded before you land, so you have data the second you step off the plane.
• Phone hotspot as the real workhorse for calls and uploads. I did most video calls tethered, not on the apartment Wi-Fi.
• A quick speed test on arrival so you know what you're working with before you commit to a meeting from there.

Power: one charger, not three

A single GaN charger (100W, multi-port) powers the laptop, phone, and accessories from one wall plug. Pair it with the right country adapter — not a bulky universal brick, just the flat plug you actually need. That one swap is the difference between a tidy bag and a tangle of cables you dig through every morning.

Capture: travel doubles as content

If you make anything online, the trip is also footage. I keep it light: a compact camera (Sony A6000) and a DJI Osmo Pocket for stabilized walking shots. The Osmo earns its place precisely because it's tiny — the best camera is the one small enough that you actually pull it out one-handed while pushing a stroller.

Backup: sync before you sleep

One rule: nothing important lives in only one place. Cloud sync for documents, and a nightly habit of offloading photos so a lost or stolen bag is an inconvenience, not a catastrophe. When you're moving cities every few days, the discipline matters more than the tool.

What I left home

No external monitor, no mechanical keyboard, no second laptop. The temptation is to recreate your desk setup; the reality is that a month of carrying it cures you of that fast. Constraints make you faster, not slower.

The whole kit fits in one backpack with room to spare for the stuff that actually fills the bag when you travel with a kid — which is a separate lesson entirely.