As I mentioned a few days ago, my family and I recently took a fun and relaxing vacation to Bethany Beach, Delaware. I booked our rental house through the VRBO app. We navigated the 9-hour drive using Waze. And of course we looked up information about local attractions online.
At no time during the planning or execution of this vacation did I speak directly with anyone. It was all facilitated by the little electronic miracles known as smartphones.
So now I'm wondering, how did we do all of this before, say, 1996? How did we plan vacations without the Internet? I simply cannot remember.
Here's a good example: At the end of my freshman, sophomore and junior years of college, I took trips to the beautiful city of Montreal. Each time I did this, I brought a friend (Kevin in 1989, Nate in 1990) or family member (nephew Mark in 1991) and we drove the 10+ hours from Wickliffe to Southern Quebec.
As I look back on it, I wonder:
- How did I make hotel reservations? That is, how did I know my hotel options, and where did I find the correct phone numbers to call? I couldn't just Google that information back then.
- How did I purchase (in advance) tickets for the two Montreal Expos baseball games we attended? Did I send them a letter or something? How did I know how much the tickets would be? Where did this information come from?
- How did I know the correct driving route to cover the 560 miles from my house to Downtown Montreal?
I can't remember how most of this was done, but I do know the answer to that last question.
The two options when it came to long drives back then were having a road atlas in the car with you and/or ordering a AAA TripTik. I always had the atlas handy, and at least once I remember getting the TripTik, which was a paper printout of very thorough driving directions provided by the helpful folks at the American Automobile Association.
Many of us back then had the special ability to decipher an absurdly detailed road atlas map while safely driving a car at 60MPH and trying to figure out exactly where we were and where we were going.
But what of the first two points? It's not like they listed Montreal phone numbers in the Cleveland Yellow Pages. How did I figure out who to call and what their numbers were?
I think the two answers were (a) library books, and (b) directory assistance.
Back when libraries mainly loaned out actual books, there was an array of destination-specific travel guides you could borrow when planning a trip. If these guides had been published in the previous 5-10 years, the phone numbers in them were probably going to be accurate. So those certainly helped.
There was also directory assistance. As long as you knew the area code of the place you wanted to go (in this case 514 for Montreal), you could dial <AREA CODE>-555-1212 and ask the nice person on the other end of the line for whatever phone number you needed.
There was a charge for this, of course, but it worked.
So I guess that's how I mapped out these trips to Montreal: Books, long-distance directory assistance, and large bound driving maps?
All I know is we somehow found our way there and back, and those vacations remain some of my most memorable.
But I'll be honest: I would much rather go the smartphone route. Fewer fines for overdue library books and no separate charges for each Google search. Technology has spoiled us far more than we probably realize.
