At about 12:30p Eastern, the family left Georgia and entered South Carolina. Nine hours later, we still hadn’t cleared. Part of the problem was the incessant craziness coming from the backseat that prompted a pit stop in a Columbia Best Buy to get a new DVD player, replacing the 5-year-old one that died in Savannah this week. Not having a detail map of the state didn’t help, nor did the several tornadoes that hit the state, one day after mucking up the SEC tourney in Atlanta.
Along the way, we listened to the Twentysomething Special of the Prairie Home Companion on NPR. I’m not a huge fan of the show, but Garrison Keillor sang a song about the future, reminiscing about living back in the day when Starbucks had free Internet instead of having the ‘net piped into one’s central nervous system through spinal implants. It seemed a fitting soundtrack to our love-hate relationship with technology—and the absence of it—as we tried to get out of the pastoral countryside of the Palmetto State.
Beneficiary: Access to Information
The fact that I could pack an object the size of a book, tie it to a wall with a cord, and have the entire world come to me is impressive. Even without the network connectivity, 120 gigabytes of storage allows for a lot of functionality and productivity. Not to long ago, even a 12-hour car ride would only allow for about 2-3 hours of work until the battery died. Now, you can plug a computer into a car with a socket adapter in the lighter.
Casualty: Dependence on Access
Despite preparation to allow me to orbit the dark side of the moon—the time away from Internet access—I am constantly amazed at how much I use the Web for little references. Can’t remember a particular coding function? Google. Need a firm definition or specific reference for a paper? Google. Need to ask someone a question? Email, or Twitter. Don’t have Internet access? Suffer. Not a lot of closure on the road until Interstates get free wi-fi, or Insight Comcast offers free cards for portable net access. It all compounds if your destination doesn’t have Internet set up properly.
Beneficiary: Trip Planning
There are so many tools for planning a trip, where you can plug in dates and cities and get a detailed list of driving directions and suggested stops along the way. Even NPR has a trip planner to tell you where their member stations are along your route. It is possible to roll your own planner, too, using Google Maps. However, …
Casualty: Preparedness
… Printing web pages is not a habit. All of those great web tools only work offline if you have a hard copy of them, or if you remember to make a PDF version (configured properly) that can be viewed on a laptop.
Do people still reserve their hotels in advance? I can’t remember many vacations where my dad took us on a road trip without knowing ahead of time where we were going to land each night. There weren’t as many options back in the day—Holiday Inn was the standard, with Ramadas being the high end and Howard Johnson’s being a regular stop for their fried food more than hotel space. We knew what we were going to see, brought along everything we needed in terms of maps, and we practically used a sexton and slide rule to define our itinerary. That is not my experience as an adult, where the plan of action is to pull off when tired or needy and pay the bucks needed for a room. This is complicated with kids, who got to experience a Holiday Inn “kid suite” on the way south last weekend. Trying to do specific searches on the go is difficult; there are no road signs for kid suite.
Beneficiary: Navigation
Google et al means we left without a proper road atlas. The exponential amount of stuff we have to drag along for a week-long trip with kids leaves little time or room for the norms of travel. We have gone through almost as many road atlas books (thanks to crazy kids) as mailboxes (thanks to crazy driving on the highway were we live), so the idea of having a GPS device tell us where to turn is wonderful …
Casualty: Memory
… Unless you don’t have a GPS system. Which we don’t. The last low-tech atlas is missing most or all of several key states, which is one of the reasons we floundered a bit after our Best Buy run. Even if we did have a GPS option, odds are good it would be less instructive than it is a crutch. For travelers, I suppose memory isn’t a huge issue—by the time I get back to Savannah, there will probably be another new Talmadge Bridge. For local travelers, though, does the GPS fade into the background, or is it the navigational equivalent of letting your cell phone remember all of your friends’ phone numbers?
Beneficiary: Just a Phone Call Away
Of course, the cell phone has been a great asset to travel. In theory. My dad’s few attempts at spontaneity with hotels required frequent ramp exits and stops at lobby desks. In. Out. In. Out. Until a room was available. Now, every hotel has an 800 number. You can call, ask and get routed to a convenient place to watch cable TV for the night, often with high-speed Internet access to boot.
Casualty: Customer Service
The problem is that the people manning these services are dependent on whatever is in front of them on the screen. We tried to find a kid suite from the Holiday Inn reservation line. The service person on the other end apparently didn’t know South Carolina geography as well as I did (which, honestly, was pretty much limited to following the signs on the interstates we were driving) and couldn’t think outside the box to help us. She couldn’t do a search for kid suites and give us some options. She kept suggesting hotels a couple hours in a different direction from where we were traveling, and she lacked any ability to use the route map on the Holiday Inn site to tell us the only kid suite on our route was the same hotel in Corbin where we were introduced to them on the way down, or that there were 19 Holiday Inns between Clinton, SC and Knoxville, TN. If only Interstate 26 had wi-fi.