Writing on Literary Hub, Cara Hoffman reminisces about living and working in Athens in the days before the internet:
We wanted to disappear. Back then, disappearing was simple. There was one telephone in the lobby of the hotel, which couldn’t make international calls. There were no cell phones. There was no internet, no social media—no way to “check in.”
To keep in touch while traveling, we exchanged addresses of the places we anticipated we’d end up and made plans to meet at specific monuments or bars or stations at specific times. If we didn’t have maps (and we never did because they were an unnecessary expense) we got lost until we knew where we were. Athens was a sprawling, radiant, dangerous city. Learning to navigate it was one of the last acts of my adolescence.
It's a story of youthful adventures, but more than that it's a story of the return to the location on one's youthful adventures - and all the memory, nostalgia, and regret that comes with it.
The title of the piece is "Getting Lost Before the Internet" which implies a good deal more than the article explores. I travelled in Europe during the age of the internet, but before the age of the smartphone. You could still get lost pretty easily, since you didn't have access to a computer at all times. Part of the beauty of Venice, for example, was getting lost in its winding streets. Part of my itinerary was to just pick a place in a guidebook and go there, with little further research than what the book told.
I'm not sure how I would fare today - I missed a lot of interesting things because I did not know about them; I stayed in a lot of pretty awful places because no reviews were to be found. I was unencumbered with obligations of online communication. But I was also lonely. You may lose some of the beauty of travel with a computer in your pocket, but you may also gain quite a bit.
