Plugged In recently published a story of mine called “Around the World in 80 Clicks,” which examined the amazing (and kinda scary) ability we have to go practically anywhere we want to via the Internet. I started by telling readers I was taking a “naycation” this year: A holiday via YouTube, where the only literal distance I’d rack up would be from the refrigerator and back.
Well, I lied. My real vacation, as it turned out, proved to be the exact opposite.
I did take a trip this year—out to California, to celebrate my son’s wedding and visit Yosemite National Park. It was a pretty fantastic trip all told, but here’s the thing: The makeshift condo we stayed at for the Yosemite leg of our vacation didn’t have Internet access: No YouTube, no Facebook, no nothing. My laptop turned out to be about as useful as a very sleek brick. And since my nifty new smartphone took an unexpected dive into a puddle of Coke earlier in the trip, this Plugged Innerite was about as unplugged as he’s been for several years.
My teenage daughter (who, the minute she was out of the womb, swiped one of the nurse’s phones and began texting) swooned every now and then, due to lack of status updates. My Internet withdrawal was less extreme, and I didn’t come close to experiencing the stages of grief. But even so, I was surprised by how frustrating it was for me to be without my online umbilical cord. Like a man trying to flip on light switches during a blackout, I’d sometimes turn on my computer only to realize that what I wanted to use it for, I couldn’t. I couldn’t see what Yosemite’s temperature would be that day, to know whether to wear jeans or shorts. I couldn’t check baseball scores. I couldn’t read my e-mail or send my extended family early vacation pictures. It was weird—as if I had lost the ability to move my right thumb. We’ve grown so accustomed to using the power of the Internet for every little thing that, when it’s gone, we kinda forget how to do things on our own. When we learned that the road we had planned to take out of Yosemite was still buried in snow and were forced to find a new route home, it unnerved me a little to realize that we’d have to find our way out via an old-fashioned foldout map rather than simply Google directions.
The fact that I’m typing this now proves that I remembered how to use a map. We humans are a resilient species, and I adjusted to the new norm in Yosemite. We learned to let go and live in the moment. And, as I mentioned, the moments in Yosemite proved to be very, very enjoyable.
But I have to admit that, when we left the park and searched for a new hotel for the night, I was scanning the signs for two important words:
“Free Wi-Fi.”
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