As travel bloggers for over fifteen years, searching for things on the internet has become a huge part of our lives. In fact, now we can hardly imagine life without the World Wide Web anymore.
It is an absolute must for finding restaurants, hotels, airplane tickets, and rental cars. But perhaps the best use for us has been finding information about the places that we are visiting. Everything we could possibly need to know is right at our finger tips. But we don’t think that is the biggest change.
That would be the power to look up absolutely anything we might need or want to know whenever we think of it. All we need to do is search. So now we constantly check the weather, or sports scores, or news headlines, or even something such as who sang that song, or what is 16/25 as a percent?
Life Before the Internet
We often wonder, “How did we do this before there was the internet?”
For us, as travel bloggers, we mostly think back to what it was like trying to find all of the things necessary to plan, and then manage, a problem free trip when going to a new destination.
1. More than just finding and paying for tickets and accommodations, we can hardly imagine doing all of the research about an area or country that we have never visited before without the ability to search online.
2. Even more crazy is thinking back to how we found those places before search engines had maps. I remember having dozens, if not hundreds, of maps and atlases under my driver’s seat for when we traveled. Then we would have to buy more anytime we went somewhere that we had not been before. Yet we still got lost all of the time! These days, detailed maps of almost anywhere on Earth are just a click or touch away.
3. Another fantastic benefit for us while we gallivant across the globe is having entertainment right at our fingertips no matter where we are. Streaming movies, television, and music is so simple now that we feel like we have become very spoiled by it.
4. Then there is the big one, online shopping. Again, we can only wonder, how did we ever get by back before the internet?
Searching for WiFi
Free WiFi
A huge issue for us back when we first began traveling all those years ago was finding decent WiFi service. We used to drive around in our motorhome desperately seeking a signal. Many times we parked behind a Starbucks or McDonald’s, or a Tim Horton’s up in Canada, so we could hopefully hook up to the internet. Back then, many hotels charged extra for WiFi too.
We are happy to report that those days seem to be behind us now that almost every business has free WiFi, and we haven’t been to a hotel that charged a fee for it in years.
Everything at Our Fingertips
Searching online has become such a routine part of our lives now that it is almost hard to remember life before it. Whether we are shopping, or looking for information about a new destination, or trying to find the answer to a question that has been bugging us, we can’t think of a time recently that we looked for something on the internet and couldn’t find it.
Internet on Our Phones
It used to be that we did this on our laptops, whether at home or on the road, but more and more we are searching for nearly everything that we can do on the bigger computers on our phones. And we hardly ever find that we need a full-sized computer to accomplish the job.
Conclusion
So even though we are folks “of a certain age,” we have completely embraced the information age. We bought our first computer back in 1990, so we have learned and grown up with the technology for over three decades. Now it has become an absolutely indispensable part of our lives. That is why we say, search and you will find when we are looking for anything on the internet.
Happy hunting.
David & Veronica, GypsyNester.com
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