Staying in Touch on vacation

It is eminently possible to spend two weeks touring London and Paris with only an iPod touch for connectivity. No phone, no laptop.

Mark Sigal and his wife used Google Maps extensively to find their way around and Facebook to stay in touch with their everyday world. They also used email, the Notes app and the Kindle reader app.

It’s remarkable how Google Maps has dramatically enhanced the tourist experience:

While I couldn’t remember the name, I did remember them having a branch near Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, so I opened the Yelp app on my iPod Touch, and typed in “sandwiches” near the geo of Rockefeller Center, and up came Cosi. (Note: Yelp had limited data for London and none for Paris).

Next, I fired up the Maps App, typed in “Cosi,” and a pin dropped on the map.
I clicked on the pin, and it confirmed that I had been staying less than two blocks from this place for the past week! I then left-clicked, and saw a picture that took me back eight years.

Lunch? It was everything that I remembered.

Also noteworthy is how they managed to find WiFi connectivity more or less all the time, though they had to keep hunting for it.

Gray connectivity was captured two ways. One was via a discovery of Wi-Fi connections within the Settings tab, and jumping from one connection to the next until we found live access. Primitive, but fungible.

The second was that we discovered a service provider that offered different tiers of Wi-Fi access on-demand, including a “20 Minutes Free” option, which was like getting a lucky board game roll.