A few blogs back I talked about my personal [Free.Water] Campaign and told you guys how I've been on a personal fight to relieve the stress that touring musicians put on the earth when it comes to plastic water bottles.  Even though I haven't been out on the road the past few months, my effort to still not use plastic water bottles continue.  Now that I'm back out on the road, I was faced with a dilemma when I had to start tour in a different city other than Nashville and I had to get there by flying.  I couldn't pack my Brita so I had to decide on either drinking tap at all locations or find another means to filter water.
In the past, I just dealt with consuming tap at all the different cities that I visited.  I would struggle with taste and sometimes really upset stomachs.  A friend would later tell me that the reasons why I probably got stomach aches was because every day I was putting a different source of tap into my body and it didn't have the time to adjust to all the variations in local purification processes.  A part of me already had decided that drinking tap wasn't an option.  My options were limited to a few things but during my recent trip out to Cali, my friend Jean was taking a drink out of her Nalgene and as I glanced at the bottle I noticed something inside that appeared to be floating.  I questioned her what the thing was inside her bottle and she said it was a filter.  I was shocked!  I didn't know that they made an in-bottle filtration system!  Knowing that she got it from REI, since she's an employee there, I knew that I could hunt it down fairly simply, so as soon as I arrived back home I started to hunt it on the website.  I dawned on me whilst searching that the filter wouldn't arrive in time before having to leave so I checked my local outdoors shop to see if they had it and lo and behold they did!  Spectacular!  So far, it has been wonderful!  The product is called TapGuard and can be found at REI and probably at your local outdoors shop.  I haven't seen it at the chains like Sports Authority or Dick's Sporting Goods but I'd rather have you all support your local groups or a cool co-op like REI.  
Two qualms though have been:

1. The carbon pack keeps falling out of it's casing obviously causing it to not filter
2. Sometimes there's a bit of gritty texture to the water when drinking.
Other than that I would highly recommend this to anyone using a Nalgene bottle!

To show you guys how cool this is I thought i'd take a little video!



TapGuard Bottle Filter from Jonathan Chu on Vimeo.