Tags
Caravan, Caravanning, Caravans, inkjet printer, Mobile Printing, Printing, Touring, Travel Trailer, Travel Trailers
You know, sometimes I miss the obvious. Someone on one of the forums (Swift Talk) was giving a tip about storing copies of important documents and forms electronically so that if you lost say your insurance document you would at least be able to print out a copy. Now that is a bit of good advice, especially travelling abroad. We have copies of all our documents and a lot of the caravan documents, manuals etc stored electronically. In fact a lot of useful manuals I have put on-line in the “Document Library” section of the blog.
However someone questioned if you lost any paperwork how would you print them out? I posted back something along the lines of we would just print them on the printer and never thought much more about it.
HP 450 Colour Inkjet Printer Image (c) HP
What never occurred to me at the time was we might be the exception rather than the rule. Do other people have printers they take with them?
Way back when we did a lot of flying, especially abroad, I always had a laptop for filing flight plans, getting the weather etc. For printing this stuff out and the approach plates for airports, in my flight bag I had a little HP 450 inkjet printer that is either mains, internal battery or 12 volts DC powered and could even be run off the aircraft systems if required. This little printer became the caravan printer. The whole printer, battery and mains plug weighs in at 2 Kg so not a huge weight and it simply stores away neatly when not being used.
It is so handy to be able to print off bits and pieces while we are away. Maps, walking routes, cycling routes, train and bus timetables and on a couple of occasions free passes for attractions. Thankfully I have never had to use it to print off lost documents. I did print off a colour connection chart of a 13 pin plug for a fellow caravanner that was having problems once.
Our printer is about 6 years old and still going strong… and its flown all over Europe and been to America a couple of times. The ink cartridges seem to last and the printer doesn’t have print quality problems if it’s not been used for a while.
The next version of it I believe was the HP 470 and can be found second-hand on-line from £50 to £70. The latest incarnation is the HP Officejet 100 and is around £150 new. Canon also do a small portable inkjet.
Caravan Chronicles 
We also had a nice compact printer that we used to take away with us. We would have it still but were totally unable to download the software to run it on a new laptop. It wasn’t just our amateur attempts that were at fault either as we had an ‘expert’ tearing his hair out trying to sort it. It seems HP simply no longer supported the old printer.
Problem with documents is that officialdom nearly always require the original rather than a printed one. Putting them on a tablet would appear to be sensible but it could be argued that they could be anyone’s paperwork.
Hi John
You are quite right of course.
However, sometimes having a copy to give is better than nothing – especially insurance forms and driving licences when touring in Europe. If you lost your passport, having a copy at least saves having to write down your passport number somewhere.
It’s not ideal, but it makes life easier if you have lost a bunch of travel documents.
S