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@DeliaChristina I'm too old and crotchety, lol. I'm just resigning myself to no international travel until this regime is gone. I had really hoped to visit New Zealand next year, but it will have to wait.

@DeliaChristina 1998?

I travelled around Europe by myself *as a child* in the '80s. Mobile phones weren't even a thing.

@DeliaChristina I did it but I was always, always lost. But kind of gloriously lost a lot of the time…

@Jackiemauro @DeliaChristina yes been so nice to learn I am perfectly normal cause of all of my people on here. #actuallyautistic

@DeliaChristina @Jackiemauro oh yes, I can’t use the apple GPS… it keeps talking and then I miss my turn… should not tell me next turn until I do first turn. Then tells me to return to route… like I know how to do that you bleeping bleep bleep. I hate google cause it fucking ruined searching the internet for info but the GPS doesn’t make me get lost.

@littlescraps @DeliaChristina zero. Just precisely zero. I really shudder to think what would have happened to me were I born in an age where I had to like get around in a forest.

@Jackiemauro @DeliaChristina oh dude I am so much worse than I understood my whole life. But learning this was a thing with AuDHD. I tested it with my husband in the woods. And my brain spins me right and left randomly. So freaky.

@DeliaChristina I accidentally left my phone and watch at home this week. After a moment of sheer terror, I just got on with it, drove to my destination, and asked someone to call a cab for me when I got to my destination.

@DeliaChristina

Rip the relevant pages out of the Let's Go travel guide and get some actual paper maps.

@DeliaChristina I did a solo holiday to Japan 25 years ago. No mobile roaming. I'm not sure I even took my phone! Barely spoke the language, but knew enough to navigate with maps and signs. And some tours. Some friends were surprised I did this, but I had a ball. Paper maps for the win! Even got lost in Kyoto at one point. :)

A few years later I went to the north-east US. Bought a NY map when I got there and other maps as I needed. And I used Internet cafes.

We get so spoilt with what our modern devices do.

@DeliaChristina next time I go overseas I'm just taking my old Nokia with 4G support. Calls? Yep. Camera? Sure thing.

Ah for simpler days....

@DeliaChristina I want to do that, but so many airlines/hotels/car rentals/etc have online or email only registration. So you have to account for that.

I almost had an issue last year when I flew and hadn't clicked through on the plane reservation to get the online-only boarding pass. :/

@Khyrie @DeliaChristina In Europe most airlines have an option to print out qr code and check in with that. Is that not an option in USA?

@DeliaChristina We DID do it before, and we lost some of the best of that when we moved into this frenetic tech life. IMHO. Yes my smartphone has opened up worlds for me, but sometimes I miss reading a really good book, getting lost in that world. Days of relaxed contemplation. Feeling more grounded, more *physical* v cerebral, like now.So yeah, we got 5his.

@DeliaChristina true that same here. Didn’t get cell phone till 2000… couldn’t afford it. But will have to have something for GPS. Cause I am directionally challenged. I am not making that part up. I have no accurate sense of space and distance… part of my AuDHD. I wonder if my old car GPS is still around.

@DeliaChristina
Yep. I've never traveled internationally "with" my phone.

(That kinda tells you how long it's been 'cause my reasoning was that I couldn't afford coverage outside the US.)

Internet cafes FTW.

@DeliaChristina I did it, and had printed maps to get around. And then I got onto one of the diagonal streets in Manhattan that I thought was a parallel one and realise I had walked several blocks south and east of my hotel on my last day and had to run to avoid missing my flight.

I travelled to Brussels with printout maps of the city from Google Maps and discovered that every street had three names: The one in French, the one in Dutch, and the one on Google Maps.

I had a flight delayed on the way home and had to dig out a phone number from my laptop (which, fortunately, I was carrying) to let people I was meeting know, using the pre-paid card for the phone booths at the airport. On a previous trip I had been flying to Tokyo and my flight was delayed in the middle of their night, so the only way of letting the folks I was meeting know was to send an email (they had phones with email, because Japan was in the future) and hope they got it because I had no way of receiving a reply.

Much more recently, I travelled with a working phone whose external speaker was broken, so nearly missed the call from the taxi driver that he’d arrived and was there to collect me, and had similar problems with taxi apps on the phone.

Travelling without a working phone is certainly possible and something I’ve done. But it’s been an enormous stress reduction to have one. And a lot of the infrastructure that was around when I didn’t have one has gone because most people do have a phone now.

@DeliaChristina Yeah, the problem is less with how smart the phone is and more with how much private information ends up on them.

@DeliaChristina yeah, Gen X is the best prepared for technology to collapse. We lived without the internet and we're comfortable with being uncomfortable for a bit.