Lost cell phone
Just the mention of “Road Trip” and my Smart Phone dove into hiding. It knew what Road Trip meants It means hours of hopping connections between cell towers to maintain contact with Facebook and its intriguing stories, pictures and links. It means scrambling to quickly find the nearest and best gas prices when the car computer insisted, “Buy gas!” Road Trip means opening emails and attachments and draining the battery in order to keep a link to the Internet. It means end of the day Internet searches for a hotel room, choose a room and reserve it before the connection is lost with the room’s ID number.
Road Trip means the headache of showing the way to San Jose when the Garmin shows the car driving through a field. Knowing all this, any Smart Phone facing a 10 day trip would go into hiding. I guess I sympathized. I was the one that turned off the phone’s sound so it would not be forced to answer when we called it out of hiding.
The clock ticked “Time to leave.” The van with the Garmin, the DVD player and laptop could wait no longer. The odometer must begin tallying miles on this road trip or we would be late to our first stop. Deprived of a cell phone, we could manage with a basic cell phone, the laptop and restaurants with free Wifi. After all, folks crossed the prairies in covered wagons with none of the above, let alone a smart phone. Plus, we traveled many years with printed maps, pay phones and postcards.
The first 15 minutes of the trip, I used the basic cell phone to type a text, “Can’t find my phone, contact me at this number for the next week.” Without voice recognition, I had to make three key strokes for letters like C or F. I sent the message to multiple people, closed the phone and opened my paperback.
Very quickly my husband realized our loss, “How many miles is it to the next turn off?”
I just looked at him.
“Oh, you can’t look it up on your phone.”
I also could not help him find the best price of nearby gas. He had to look out the window and find one as he drove.
I had planned to Google the location of Little Free libraries near our route. The only day we visited some, I woke early, pulled out my laptop, used the hotel Wifi, found the Internet site for the Libraries and copied a list of addresses to enter into the Garmin.
I really missed Smart Phone at the few yard sales we visited. I desperately wanted to do a price check. No Smart Phone, no price check.
No Smart Phone and no built-in camera meant no handy app to upload pictures to the web. Instead I hid behind the digital camera and uploaded the pictures to the laptop and then the web.
No Smart Phone gave me time work on that unfinished cross stitch project and to read a thick book without worrying about the battery. I see the advantages, but hours away from home, when I reached for the phone to pull up the app for the daily newspaper, I wanted my Smart Phone.
I used the DVD player in the van to catch up on shows I had missed during my TV deprived childhood. Smart Phone stayed home this time and somehow I managed the entire trip without it.
It wasn’t quite like riding in a covered wagon, but almost.