What do I need to protect myself on hotel wifi?

I work on the road 2/3 of the year, and was wondering what I need to do to better protect myself on public networks. I'm currently using a vpn (privateinternetaccess), but is there any external hardware and firewall/encryption software I should be using as well? Thanks for the help. 

well, you can bring along a wireless access point/firewall box. It is a small formfactor PC that is running something like smoothwall or pfsense and has wifi built in. It allows you to connect it to the hotel Wifi and it will run everything through a firewall. You can even set it up to use the VPN.

A VPN is all you need to protect your traffic from being intercepted. And as long as you have a firewall running on your computer (any firewall is fine, you're not trying to do anything complicated just block incoming traffic which all firewalls do by default) you don't need to have any kind of external hardware.

Actually, the best method you can use is to boot your machine off a Linux Live Disc/USB and do all your surfing  from the Live OS over the VPN (if you want to). This allows you to surf and not worry about infections and so on.