Our Five School Holiday Essentials

CHARGERS, CABLES AND BACKUP BATTERY

Cables, back-up cables, car chargers, 240v chargers. All that stuff you need to keep your tech running in any situation. My go-to battery backup, which will run my Macbook Pro for hours, charge my Sony RX10 quickly, and everything from phones to tablets, is the Anker PowerCore 26800mAh Power Bank. The Powertraveller Extreme solar panel charger is the business. It’s a rugged “clamshell” design with 5 watt, 5V 1A (maximum) output and $145 from Harvey Norman. Plug and charge everything from phones and tablets to GPS units and head torches. An absolute “must” for me is a car inverter, which means you can run 240v off the 12v vehicle. I like the iTechWorld 400W pure sine wave inverter, currently reduced from $199 to $139 at itechworld.com.au. They also have a neat little 75W inverter for small stuff at $45.

PACK OF CARDS

Some families will play rummy, whist or even “snap”, for sure.

But try Donkey, for three or more players. Deal out four cards each, face down. The players take it in turns to slide an unwanted card upside down to the player to the left. That player decides whether to keep it or pass it, or another card. Play continues until a player has 4 cards the same.

Find the full rules online.

CONTAINER OF SCROGGIN (TRAIL MIX)

Disagreements can often be traced to hunger. Everyone gets “snacky and snappy”, so be ready. Resort to proper food. “Scroggin”, or trail mix, is a mixture of dried fruit, nuts and “treats” like bits of chocolate. The trick is to mix bits everyone loves (chocolate) with contrasting bits (cashews) and bits with high nutrients (sultanas and seeds). Head to the supermarket pick ’n’ mix and brew up your own concoction.

HEMA MAPS ON YOUR PHONE

Having HEMA Explorer Australia maps in your phone means you’ve got great maps on GPS (working even when you have no mobile coverage) and a dot on the map which is you, with an arrow pointing in the direction you’re heading. It has multi-scale topographic mapping and 40,000 points of interest, you can save routes, generate a route to navigate offline, then backup your track logs — and add geotagged photos and trip notes to your Hema Explorer Cloud account to remember your trip and share it online.

They have various app prices. I have the full 4WD Maps set at $99. Add an Explorer Pro subscription to the standard Hema Explorer app to access Australia’s most detailed topographic mapping and use powerful navigation features for $49.99 a year or $9.99 a month. shop.hemamaps.com

UKULELES — ENOUGH TO GO AROUND

With the three major chords, D, G and C, you can play everything from Taylor Swift’s Lover to Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire. And John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane, come to think of it — which seems appropriately and frustratingly inappropriate. (None of the chords uses more than three fingers and the C uses only one.)

Call in at my go-to music shop, Concept Music in Cambridge Street, Wembley, for a Makala from $59.99 (better still, get a different coloured one for each member of the family). And they have a terrific selection of good ukes (if you pay about $160, you’ll get a pretty sweet sounding ukulele — conceptmusic.com.au). Look out for those made from koa, the Hawaiian timber-of-choice. Then head to the Ukulele Beginner Course at justinguitar.com — Justin Sandercoe is the best stringed-instrument teacher teacher I’ve ever had. (Make a donation to Justin, an Australian based in London. I do.)