Lighting Up The Night

We have several friends who live about two hours away from us. Because they're all clustered in one area, we're often the ones driving to go visit all of them. We've done the drive so many times now, I think we could do it in our sleep. We often drive back at night, which leaves the passenger in the boring position of staring at the cars. Reading is difficult to do without distracting the driver or creating too much glare on the windshield. Our SUV has map lights in the ceiling, but those are too bright to the driver to use for any longer than a few minutes.

The Parent Bloggers Network sent me the Autolite Spotglo as an alternative to those dark, boring drives. It's a reading light that clips onto your seatbelt so that the light is only focused on your lap.

I like how small it is. The Spotglo stores easily in the glove compartment - even an overcrowded one like ours. It clips easily over the seatbelt and doesn't add a huge weight to the shoulder belt.

The light has two settings: low and high. Low was sufficient for me, but I used the high anyway to prevent any chance of eye strain. It's a bright, white light - I was impressed with the light strength.

The only problem I had with it was that it was hard to get the right angle on the light. While it works great for men and kids, it doesn't angle so well for women with anything over a B-cup. I had to hold it in the right position several times or lean forward slightly to get the best light. If they ever redesign it, I'd suggest having the light on a hinge so that it could move out and away from the main unit (even just an inch or two) for better positioning.

The warnings in the package say that this isn't to be used by the front-seat passenger, but since our back seat was filled with sleeping children, I wasn't able to use it any other way. It didn't distract my husband, though, so I would continue to use it in the front seat.

Cordy was a little too young and sleepy to try this out, but when she's older this will be perfect for her to read her books in the car on long drives. At that time I will probably be thankful this product can save me from countless refrains of, "Are we there yet?"

If you do a lot of driving at night, or long-distance driving, the Autolite Spotglo is a good product to have with you for your passenger, or your kids in the backseat. I think we'll be getting a lot of use from this on our long weekend drives.