Traveling back through time

Traveling has changed an unbelievable amount since when my parents traveled about 20 years ago.
They were gone for six weeks making their way through Europe. They went to eight countries, England, France, Italy, Czech Republic, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. (That’s when they caught the traveling bug and decided they were going to travel with their kids one day) Everything was different and a lot harder.
One way things were more difficult was communication. There wasn’t a lot of ways to communicate like there is now. One option they had had was by letter, but those showed up back home in Washington about the same time they did! It was the same way with postcards. They would also buy little phone cards with minutes on them and go to the phone booth and use those to talk to their families for a couple minutes. Today we have an infinite amount of choices to stay in touch with everyone back home. Instagram is probably our main source of communication, it’s quick and easy to throw up a few pictures with a small caption about our latest adventure. Email is another big one, or you could get a texting app so it doesn’t actually use data. Face time or Skype is amazing because its so nice to see people’s faces. Then of course there’s our blog which we get to share a more detailed account of our day or anything else we choose to write about.
There was no Internet. It’s hard for me to imagine, but it’s true there was no Internet. So they never could read about the places they were going to, or look up somewhere to eat, they couldn’t see revues on anything from an airline to a restaurant or a hostel. It was always a gamble. Since there was no Internet they would read lots of books, they would even cut out chapters of Europe Through the Backdoor (a travel guide written by Rick Steve) that were about the countries they were going to and bring it with them. Or they would just hear word from locals or other people they would meet at hostels about where to go or not to go. No Internet also meant that if you had a question you couldn’t just stop and look it up on your phone (there were no cellphones that you could do anything but call on back then). When they would get to a town they would just walk around and look for a sign that said there were rooms available.
On their trip they defiantly carried lighter with technology then we have on this one we have a total of three iPods, two iPhones, six iPads, 1 laptop, and two cameras, plus an abundance of cords and chargers. Back then they didn’t have digital cameras so they took pictures with film, and they would carry the film canisters with them everywhere.
Something that changed in Europe was the European Euro. The Euro didn’t exist so it was all different currencies in Europe. So they changed all the time on their six weeks of adventure. We’re pretty used to that though we’ve gone through a lot of different currencies on this trip.