Travel before the internet. Some different.

Then there was the money thing.No ATMs. Imagine that.So you could carry a credit card and dream of finding a place to get a cash advance. A big illusion which almost never happened. Before that was the Cooks or AmEx funny money. The infamous travelers check. So, you had to go to a bank and buy with real cash these travelers checks. They wrote down the number and denomination of each check and gave you a record book to keep a record of each one you spent so that if they got stolen, AmEx would replace the stolen ones. And they wanted you to take a bunch of small ones because most store and restaurants wouldn't cash large ones. I kid you not. We did this.

I always lost track of the book keeping or rather my record keeping. If my checks ever had gotten stolen I wouldn't have any numbers to claim. The next fun part was that in some countries, the black market was the deal. I remember sending my kids into alleys to cash checks illegally while I watched on the street for cops. These were the countries where you got a better deal on the street. Other places you had to find a bank, find an open bank, stand in line for hours and maybe get some cash. We very often paid the whole bill at restaurants with travelers checks and then everyone would pay us in local money. Pain in the ass. And in Europe, you had to change currency for every country. In fact you had to do that everywhere. The good old days.

So, now when I took the kids, I had this frigging huge bundle of our plane tickets, our passports, our travelers checks. Half a pocketbook full right there.

You had to take a real camera and real film. Imagine that. And mostly you had to wait until you got home to get it developed. Imagine that.

And phones, forgeddaboudit. I have told some Guatemala phone stories before. All day, very social, extreme frustration and so not worth the exercise or the money. And the time I sent Randie a telegram from Antigua to Todos Santos. I went to the telegram office and spent a good long time writing out this invite to Randie to meet in Honduras for some beach time. Had to be in Spanish and it was pretty sketchy. The telegram lady told me I would have to pay by the word. But the price was next to nothing. I wrote my message and handed it to her. She handed it back after about 20 minutes and said, "too long."  Now in this whole interchange, about an hour, there were no other customers. I asked how it could possibly be too long if I was paying by the word. "Too long." After another bunch of rejections of my efforts, I ended up paying 4 cents and sending the telegram that said "Roatan?". On Randie's end, no one near he house  in Todos Santos had a phone so someone from the telegraph office went to her house and told her she had a telegram. She went to read it and had to go back for ID even though she had lived there for more than a year and there were only a few hundred people. When they were convinced that she was she, they charged her 20 cents to read the telegram. For another 20 cents she responded to me "Ya no." "Not now." I had to bring my passport and pay 20 cents to see her answer.

How did these things ever work out? Somehow we arranged a trip to Honduras that included several friends who were living in Costa Rica as well. I don't know how we did this stuff before the Internet, but we did.

More tomorrow.