The Hotel Room With One Outlet Behind the Bed

The outlet situation in that motel outside Twin Falls was almost comical, except it was 5:40 in the morning and we had a canyon overlook to reach before the light went flat. Two outlets in the whole room, both wedged behind a nightstand bolted to the wall, and on top of that nightstand sat my phone, Rennie's phone, her Kindle, and a Bluetooth speaker we'd run down to nothing the night before. Four things needing power. Two outlets. One of them already committed to the lamp. A QINLIANF travel power strip lives in my bag now because of mornings like that one.

I did the math out loud, which Rennie will tell you I do too often on early mornings. Unplug the lamp, lose the only light in the room while we packed. Unplug the speaker, fine, it could wait until the car. Unplug one phone charger for twenty minutes, then swap it for the other, and hope both had enough charge by the time we needed to load the 4Runner and go. It worked, in the sense nobody's phone died on the drive out. It also meant neither of us slept past five thirty, because somebody had to stay awake to manage the swap. It wasn't the first time a hotel room had done this to us.

When we got back to Boise I ordered a QINLIANF power strip, the compact three-sided kind with five outlets and four USB ports built into the sides instead of stacked all in a row. It cost less than a tank of gas and weighs about what a phone weighs. I didn't expect to think about it again once it showed up. I was wrong. It's lived in the same zippered pocket of my bag for over a year now, and it's solved some version of that Twin Falls problem in probably thirty rooms since, from budget motels off the interstate to the nicer places we book when we're stretching a trip into an anniversary.

The setup now is boring, in the good way. I find whatever outlet is reachable, even the awkward one hiding behind a headboard, plug the strip in once, and stop thinking about it. The three-sided layout means cords don't elbow each other for space the way they do on a straight strip, and the USB ports mean I'm not hauling four separate wall bricks anymore. Phone, Kindle, Rennie's phone, whatever else needs a charge, all off one outlet, all night, no five-thirty wake-up call to play outlet musical chairs.

One outlet became four. That's the whole review, honestly.

The strip has ridden along on most of our road trips since, wedged in the center console of the 4Runner more often than packed in a suitcase, and it's flown with us domestically too, tucked in a carry-on next to a charger cable that used to be its own tangled mess. I wrote up the longer version of that first year, outlet counts and all, in our full long-term review of the QINLIANF strip, if you want the mile-by-mile version.

There was a repeat of Twin Falls almost a year later, in a hotel near the Denver airport before an early flight home. Same problem exactly, two outlets, one behind a desk we couldn't move, and this time it didn't matter. I plugged the strip into the reachable one, ran four cords off it, and went to bed at a normal hour instead of setting an alarm to babysit a charger swap. Rennie noticed before I said anything. She just said, quietly, that this was the first hotel morning in a while where nobody was cursing at an outlet.

It's not flawless. One of the four USB ports has gotten noticeably slower at charging than the other three, enough that I now plug Rennie's phone into a different port on purpose. The little indicator light for the surge protection also dimmed somewhere around month eight, still seems to work as far as I can tell, just doesn't glow as bright as it did new. Neither thing has stopped us from using it. Small tradeoffs against never doing the two-outlet shuffle again.

If you want the fuller case for why this turned into a fixture instead of a novelty item, I put together ten reasons a power strip earns its spot in every travel bag, most of which came straight out of nights like the one in Twin Falls.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you travel enough that you've ever done the outlet shuffle at five in the morning, just get one of these and stop thinking about it. It's not going to transform your trip. It solves one specific, annoying, recurring problem, not enough reachable outlets for the number of things that need to charge overnight. That's it. That's the whole pitch. I don't think a power strip needs to be more than that, and I'd rather tell you it's boring and reliable than pretend it changed how we travel. It just removed one small argument with the room, every time, since, and honestly that's worth more to me these days than most of the gear I've bought that promised something bigger.