When you're lost, virtually and otherwise

I’ve heard folks say they wished they could go off the grid and live without phones, TVs and the World Wide Web.

Yeah, right.

To them I say, just try it. I have.

The week after Thanksgiving a few years ago, Ginny and I traveled by car to the Deep South. The radio stations we heard during the 600 miles-plus drive were nonstop “Holly-Jolly Christmas” and “Rudolf the Rednose Reindeer,” with an occasional blast from the past such as “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus.”

Everybody knows Mama was really planting one on the ol’ man, who happened to be wearing the red hunting cap she’d bought him and he’d found under the Christmas tree. Junior snuck out of bed to survey the scene downstairs and misidentified Pops for Santy Claus.

But that’s another story.

Our trip was prolonged when I inadvertently chose I-20 in Atlanta rather than I-85. By the time I realized my mistake, we were well into Alabama.

But fortune smiled on us when I took the first exit ramp to consider our situation. When we looked at the old-fashioned highway map (the kind most people can never fold back correctly and end up wadding up and tossing on the floorboard), we discovered that we were on a highway that took us directly to the proper interstate. All we had to do was drive through a number of small towns with slower-than-Moses stoplights and rush-hour traffic.

The first destination on our trip was Brewton, Ala., known for wood products and the annual blueberry festival. Ginny’s sister, Jan, and her husband, Bill, greeted us two hours later than our original ETA.

Jan and Bill were old school, meaning they hadn’t discovered the miracles of computers, the internet or malware. They were so out of the loop that they thought a virus was some sort of medical problem.

So I can only guess what images came into Jan’s mind when Ginny talked to her about messaging their sisters on Facebook.

Jan and Bill had invested somewhat in the digital age with a 50-inch TV hooked to a satellite dish. That’s so Bill could watch his Miss’ippi State Bulldogs put up a credible fight with the Crimson Tide.

Much as we enjoyed visiting with them, we couldn’t use our smartphones, tablets or laptop at their place since there was no wifi. So our link to the world was by TV, which is no fun without popups to engage us in the latest on the Kardashians (are they even news anymore?).

After a night with Jan and Bill, we left for Pensacola for three days of fun in the sun. Only, there wasn’t much sun to be seen except for the day we left, natch.

I was fortunate to have a friend who recently purchased a house in Pensacola and was willing to let us use it. The good news is, it’s near the beach, dozens of restaurants and more shopping than Ginny can shake a credit card at.

The bad news? My friend had yet to furnish the house with a TV or internet service. So we were back in the analog age, a veritable return to the ’90s but without MTV.

I could still use my smartphone to access the internet. But one night I spent about an hour watching a video and used almost all my data, forcing me to go to airplane mode for the rest of the trip.

So we were relegated to reading magazines and playing built-in Solitaire games on our digital devices.

I did find wifi in some of the businesses we patronized. But my favorite websites were said to be unavailable.

What? I thought those sites were regular travelers on the information highway. It had been my impression that they were somewhere up in a cloud, waiting to rain down their information on my smartphone.

The point of all this is that Ginny and I were without access to the digital world for nigh onto a week. By the time we got back to our online virtual world, the real world of earth and sky had made serious inroads into our consciousness.

Just kidding. Ginny was soon back on Facebook with a passion and I was again checking my multiple email accounts hoping someone out there hadn’t forgotten this exile from virtual reality.

The lesson learned? I knew better than to abstain from GPS on long trips

Larry Penkava is a writer for Randolph Hub. Contact: 336-302-2189, larrypenkava@gmail.com.