So I just wanted to share my experience with the Deck for the last 10 months. We are traveling a full year, so two months to go, and I’ve taken my deck along for the ride (actually, I bought it just for the trip). I hope some of this information may be useful to those considering going on a trip - however long that may be - and taking the deck. To keep things clear I’ll make a list of plusses and minuses so even ADHD brains like mine will be able to follow:

• This thing makes air travel a dream. Time passes by so quickly just playing some indie or emulated games.
• Emudeck is absolutely amazing. It takes some tinkering but the games will appear in your game list with art and the experience is like launching any other game. On top of that, emulation for most platforms does not use a lot of power and you can expect to spend 4 hours on a single charge.
• I brought a USB-C to HDMI converter and a HDMI cable. I have used this thing plugged in to TV’s all across the world. My girlfriend and I have played games like the Quarry or the dark pictures games together in the evenings when we wanted some peace and quiet and its a great change of pace from lying in bed watching a film or some series.
• If you know how to use it properly you can play almost all games offline (unless they require a connection to play obviously such as only online games or live service games).
• Heroic games launcher allows me to play games from the Epic , GoG and Amazon stores and it’s quite useful. I have a huge catalog of free games released each week on the epic store and a couple of good ones I get for free from Amazon Prime. Downside is it doesn’t pre download shaders like games on Steam would. This makes me really prefer buying games on Steam and I have resulted to buy games a second time just to get them on Steam. Running a game like Borderlands 3 on the deck from Epic results in low FPS compared to running it through Steam.
• It’s still a relatively capable handheld graphic-wise. Ive played loads of new releases but it did require me to plugin or face abysmal playtime as the battery runs down really quick. Games I’ve run and look quite well are Diablo 4, Cyberpunk with its new DLC, and loads more (I’m afraid to run Starfield). Which brings me to the first negative point:

• Battery life can be a bitch. I bring a big power brick. This heavily weighs down my luggage, I don’t know the exact weight but I’m pretty sure the brick is heavier than the deck. When you travel a long time it really matters how heavy your bag is.
• It’s a big machine and takes up quite some space. Especially if you bring accessories for it. I’ve seen people take controllers on their travels on this sub. I wouldn’t dream of that after 10 months of travel.
• I traveled some countries where theft and robbery is more likely to happen than in the western world. This has kept me from whipping out my deck on buses or other sort of transportation.
• It’s not great for other uses than gaming. I would prefer a gaming laptop running windows over a Steam Deck any day for photo and video editing or other uses. I brought a Steam Deck and a Samsung Tab S8 ultra on this trip running android. Often I have thought that bringing a single gaming laptop would have been the better choice. However, this would not have been as great a solution on flights.
• Tinkering around with the Deck is a lot of trouble using just the touchpads and the built in keyboard. It really keeps me from doing what I usually would on a laptop or PC. I had to set up emudeck again because of an update, and one time most of my games just disappeared from steam for no apparent reason. It’s a real bitch having to set that up again using only the deck without accessories.
• Often when you travel you really don’t have that much time to play games. There are so many games I would like to get into but I simply do not have the time. This is a big luxury problem, obviously. I love games that usually require a lot of time (big rpgs) and I guess it was kind of an unrealistic expectations to believe that I would be able to play those games on the road.

• Any sort of cloud gaming will likely not work due to geo-restrictions or terrible wifi at your hotel.

So hope this helps someone or was a fun read nonetheless. Any questions I will of course answer in the comments, ask away.