My son Rob is a consummate traveler. As president of a worldwide service company, he is almost constantly on the go. I rarely know where he is, so it’s difficult to reach him by phone.
Fortunately, there is e-mail. A notebook computer is Rob’s constant companion, and wherever he lands, he connects it promptly to receive and send messages. When I sent him one recently at 10 a.m. in New York, thinking he was in Georgia or Texas, I received a reply in 10 minutes. “Where are you?” I then asked. “In Sydney, Australia,” he replied, “and I’m just about to go to bed.”
I’ve learned a lot from Rob and others, as well as from my own experiences, about how best to keep connected while traveling in this electronic age. In hotels, be prepared for the worst. More and more hotels, especially those that cater largely to business travelers, have so-called data ports–where you can plug your computer modem into an in-room phone–but most still do not. Even if they do, if you want to make and receive voice calls while on-line, you need two lines, which you usually won’t find.
In many, perhaps most, hotel rooms the only phone is at bedside with a short cord, while the only place to use a computer comfortably is at a table across the room. I solved this problem by buying a 25-foot cord at Radio Shack and substituting it for the hotel’s cord to go on-line. Even after overcoming all the equipment snags, getting on-line can be expensive, indeed. I receive and send e-mail and reach the Internet via the subscription service America Online ($19.95 a month for unlimited usage), which has local access phone numbers throughout the United States and in many cities abroad. Ideally, access shouldn’t cost more than a local phone call, but it is often much more.
Many hotels charge for local calls from guest rooms. If it’s $1 or $1.50 per call, that’s not too bad. But if it’s per minute, tolls for computer users can mount quickly.
On a recent trip through the Great Smokies, I found that to reach the nearest AOL number, in Asheville, N.C., would require a long-distance call. Using a telephone charge card, it was just as cheap to connect via my hometown access number in Philadelphia as via Asheville. Yet even at the relatively low weekday rate of 17.5 cents a minute, the call cost $21 because I surfed the Internet for an hour and a half.
The thought of that makes me tense. Add that to all the other tension-provoking aspects of travel: traffic jams to and from airports, congested airport terminals, delayed delivery of luggage, hotel check-in and check-out lines, whatever. To ease tension, I turn to my computer and play solitaire. Then I encounter a new problem: solitaire becomes addictive, and I’m playing electronic cards when I should be working.
Sometimes “work” on the computer can be fascinating, however. To ease my travels and prepare for my destinations, I seek out several favorite sites on the World Wide Web. They include:
– For weather conditions and forecasts: WeatherNet (cirrus.sprl.umich.edu/wxnet). When planning a recent business trip to Billings, Mont., I quickly learned that the weather there for the next five days would be pretty much like at home near Philadelphia: partly cloudy, in the 60s, with a 20 percent chance of rain. I packed accordingly. Type in any American ZIP code or the name of any major foreign city and WeatherNet responds almost instantly.
– For health information: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (www.cdc.gov/travel/travel.html). If I scan this site before traveling abroad, I can often one-up my physician. When I ask him about shots and preventive medicines, he shrugs and asks me. I can quickly reply that diarrhea is common in India and hepatitis A and typhoid are risks in rural areas there.
– For personal security: The National Security Institute (nsi.org/personal.html). This consulting service, based in Westborough, Mass., offers everything you ought to know about personal security at home and while traveling. You’ll find the latest cautionary bulletins from the State Department, how to guard against terrorism, what to do in a hotel fire, tips for a secure vacation and much, much more.
– For airport information: QuickAID (www.quickaid.com). All you probably want to know about airlines, passenger services, ground transportation and nearby hotels at major domestic airports, plus links to the Web sites of many foreign airports. The site is a project of the QuickATM Corp., a 4-year-old company that provides touch-screen airport information kiosks.
– For auto rentals: BreezeNet’s Guide to Airport Rental Cars (www.bnm.com/rcar.htm). Covers 52 major airports in the United States and eight in Canada, plus London, Frankfurt, Paris, Rome, Shannon and Sydney. The site tells what major rental companies are at each airport, whether in-terminal or remote, and connects to their Web sites.
– For leisure-time planning: NewsWorks (www.newsworks.com). This is a national network of more than 100 local newspaper sites around the United States. In advance of a trip to Oklahoma, for example, I scanned the Tulsa World and, with what I found in it, planned to spend Saturday night watching three classic dances being performed by the Tulsa Ballet.
– For do-it-yourself foreign travel: Lonely Planet (www.lonelyplanet.com). For those who prefer making their own arrangements, this site of the Australian-based guidebook publisher is a gem. It provides a taste of what the down-to-earth guidebooks offer, but it abounds nonetheless in pertinent destination information for all travelers, not just its reputed audience of young backpackers on minuscule budgets.
– For European museums: European Museum Guide (www.museumguide.com/). Click your mouse on the name of any major western European city, and you’ll learn what’s doing at its museums. At this writing, for example, the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, the Netherlands, was exhibiting an archeological collection dating to 250,000 B.C., a few years before the Internet was conceived (closed Mondays).
———-
Paul Grimes can be reached by e-mail at paulmark@aol.com
