Before heading out on the Summer of Love, our 6-week family road trip, I suggested to Tammy that we may want to consider getting one of the big iPod Classics. We are going to put a lot of time in the van on this trip, and the van has a full AV input that can take the audio signal as well as video. We picked up the 160G unit before the trip and I was really happy to be able to put every single on of our 15,000 songs on it as well as a dozen movies for Mazie and even had enough room to put 4 rented movies on it for us.

Today was the first day of use and I was really happy we splurged for this extra. It was just great to have all of our music on hand at any whim. It was also nice being able to play movies for Mazie without having to fumble around with the DVDs and then navigate their menus to get them playing.

I love this use case for rentals too. We dumped 4 rentals on the iPod and will just watch them as we wish over the next 4 weeks of the trip.

We also happened to have a set of compact speakers to use with our other flash-memory based iPod. I’m still getting life out of the iPod Mini that I have using it only for kids music. But now we can drop the iPod Classic in it on our stays and enjoy some tunes in between the drives too.