"How Did People Travel Before the Internet?" Oh boy. That's an Interesting Question.

So, a few of us were flopping around a low budget guest house patio the other evening in Ubud, Indonesia. I was seriously flopping because it has been frigging HOT both here and in Thailand last month. It is my promise to myself and my friends and family that I am breaking when I mention the heat thing. I have complained about the cold for so long that I swore off mentioning heat. But, that being said, in both countries the rains are very late and the build up of both dust and smoke and humidity is pretty epic. It is hot. Fabulously, it cools down in the evening when I am both drained and dehydrated. Hence, the 'flopping'.

This young Scottish guy, very nice, kind of wired for speed, and certainly in charge of his life was talking about his solar business which he is bringing from Africa to Indonesia. He sells (very cheaply) solar cells to villages without electricity so people can have a light bulb or charge a phone. And he was going on and we were asking questions that hopefully didn't leave us looking too very stupid.

Then he kind of looked at us with sort of a strange look and asked, "My God, How did you ever travel before the internet?"  He turned 15 the same year he got connected and has never experienced travel without the internet.

I got all sorts of defensive and wondered if he meant back before cars and planes or just in the more recent prehistoric times. My first big trip in 1963, I took a boat to Europe and it took us 13 days. (But we flew home) so we were pretty modern! But, he was asking the nuts and bolts kind of questions and it was a staggering challenge to him to picture it.

I am reminded of the time when my grand daughter was 3 1/2 and she called me from her iphone and I had an old flip phone and she handed her phone to her Mom and said, "The phone is broken, I can't see Grandma." She will never remember a time when you couldn't see the person you were talking to on the phone, let alone all the stages in between.

My grandmother Braucher in Kutztown, PA had a party line and the live operator made your connection. Then we had the hall phone and when it rang, everyone would rush downstairs and stand around. Then came the big excitement of the long extension cord so you could take the phone into the hall closet and be private, except for Dad standing outside reminding everyone that "This is expensive and the phone is for important business, not for chatting." He must have said that a million times over the years.

So we had a little fun telling about the old days and Nick got a chance to stretch his imagination.

Firstly, we had travel agents. Here he broke in and said but they don't do anything you can't do. This may be the case now, but in the late 50s and early 60s, your travel agent was very important. He/she was usually someone who had traveled. She was paid by the airlines. She made all the calls(!) to the airlines about schedules and prices. The airlines and ships and even trains cultivated the agents and gave them good prices so everyone benefited. A good agent could work wonders. I miss this today when I spend hours being frustrated by all the stupid time on the computer trying to figure out a good deal. I have had to become my own travel agent and it is a royal pain in the ass and I swear they got better deals because of their special relationships.

When I am going someplace I almost always have the moment of ruing the day when we had to become our own agent. Not to mention the insane frustration of the early days when the Internet was connected to the phone and a frigging call would come in just as you were booking and you lost everything.

Then the travel agent would get your tickets and deliver them to your house. Nice. Bad part was you had to carry the damn tickets around for the whole trip and if you lost them you were up the creek. Also a troublesome intermediary stage when some countries wouldn't accept e-tickets. That caused a few disturbances.

So, you figured out where you wanted to go and then you made your tickets. Things were different, of course depending on your budget and your destination. Going to Europe from USA was easy. Going to South and Central America or Asia or Africa, a lot more complicated. Some countries were closed to us. Tibet was a problem, China and Russia were complicated. You mostly had to go with a group and a watcher. Some memory that you couldn't go from Israel to an Arab country or visa versa. First you called the Embassy and sent in your passport to get a visa. Still do, of course, some places. But you had to call or mail for information or your travel agent looked into it for you.

When I called the Guatemala Embassy to get visas for my kids and me, the guy asked about our trip and then got all emotional and said this trip was a disaster and we shouldn't go and he wasn't going to be responsible for our deaths. I thought he was concerned about the genocide that was happening to the Mayans there. I said that I knew people who traveled there with their kids and loved it. He was nearly hysterical and I asked why. He said that I was an independent American woman and I was going to rent a car and be driving in the countryside and run out of gas at night because all the stations were closed at night and then we were going to be robbed especially of the car and maybe die alongside of the road and how could I do that as a mother.

I took a deep breath and said I was never planning to drive. I liked hiring a driver or going by bus. Never.

He took a deep breath and said, "Then you will have the most wonderful time of your life in my beautiful country. I will send the visas."

More tomorrow. God willing.