The Love/Hate of Travel in the Time of Wi-Fi

When Mike and I first started traveling together, the internet was a brand-new thing and mostly pretty useless. We navigated our way through Mexico in the late 90s with paper maps and sent postcards back home to family and friends. By the time we went to India in 2003, internet cafes were a thing, so I think we stopped in a couple to touch base with our employees and make sure our business was still running. Still, though, Google Maps didn’t exist, or if it did we certainly didn’t know about it. And we definitely weren’t booking flights or reserving spots at museums from our phones. We didn’t even have phones that could do that, let alone ones that would be worth bringing along internationally. I can’t fathom how much international calls would have cost, if we could even have figured out a way to make them.

Believe it or not, this is really the first time we’ve used our phones much for international travel, thanks to Google Fi making it simple to go from country to country. On previous trips we had AT&T, and no matter how many hoops I jumped through to avoid charges, inevitably something would go wrong and I’d end up with a big bill at the end. (Thankfully a nice Texan working their customer service desk agreed with me that my charges from Germany in 2011 were bullshit and not my fault, so those were reversed.) Anyway, it’s been pretty seamless on this trip. We still try to use wi-fi when we can, rather than data, but we’ve consistently had internet access in one way or another most of the trip.

That is mostly a good thing. Great, even. We’ve been able to find our way around. We haven’t had to carry physical maps of all the cities. We’ve texted and WhatsApped and Instagrammed with friends and family. We’ve booked planes, trains, and automobiles. Travel is far simpler than it used to be.

BUT. (You had to know a “but” was coming.) It’s kinda lonely. It’s a little less fun.

I’ll explain. We used to interact with people so much more - locals or even other travelers - in large part because we had to. We needed help navigating or we wanted restaurant recommendations. Also, when we couldn’t be in constant contact with loved ones, we sometimes found new loved ones. Or we at least found good company for a few days. Everyone needed each other more, so we all found each other IRL.

And maybe this is more of a post-pandemic thing than an internet thing, but spontaneous, “winging it” travel is dead. Everything requires reservations and QR codes for entry. Not just hotels and flights, but also buses, trains, museums, zoos, cathedrals. All that’s left for wandering into are shops and restaurants.

Mike had wanted to do some go-with-the-flow travel from Day One, but I’m more of a planner and had done enough research to know that Europe in summer is packed with tourists. So we met in the middle, and I planned the first month but nothing beyond that.

Then we started traveling, and it turned out my OCD travel was going to have to win out, regardless of what we wanted. At every turn, we found that last-minute rarely worked, and just showing up somewhere was a non-starter.

We’re now nearing the end of August. Schools are starting back up, and grownups are going back to work. We’re hopeful that this will lessen the crowds everywhere, and that maybe, just maybe, that means we can go a bit more rogue. Overall, I’m still grateful for connectivity in the form of internet, but I hope we can find some real-life connectivity along the way, too.

P.S. There’s a big part of me who is desperate to have constant wifi again, after staying in a wifi-free apartment for close to three weeks. I wrote a long post to share here the other day, and thanks to no internet, it got lost in the void. Gah! It’s hard to get motivated to re-write that one.