Care and Feeding of Electric-tarians

From the start, Pierre and I have divvied up our to-do list for this trip. In general, we try to to be conscientious about not only taking on those things that we like doing. For example, I don't mind packing and sorting so I tend to do a lot of that and end up leaving any internet research (among other things) for Pierre to do.

I decided a few months ago that I'd volunteer to be in charge of figuring out what power converters we'd need for the trip. I took a few stabs at searching the internet for travel kits, but all the ones I found said "not suitable for electronics".

This was a problem - we've whittled our list of electric travel buddies down to the basics but they're all electronics: big camera, little camera, ipod. No matter where I searched (high, low), I couldn't seem to find one that could be used on electronics.

So, I asked Pierre to give me a hand, and it took him all of two minutes to figure it out. (Now that I think about it, it would have been a lot more efficient to assign the electric questions to the electrical engineer.)

Verdict: The plugs for electronics are already built to convert different power supplies. The text descriptions pasted to each black electronic plug explains this (though not in those exact words). All you need is an adapter to stick on the two built-for-Canada prongs to suit whatever sockets you meet. So the power portion of our luggage will consist of only three plugs and an adapter. Much less than I thought we'd be able to get away with.