Lonely Planet

We had bought a copy of Lonely Planet (Western Europe) for the Europe trip. It had the footprint of a medium-sized paperback but was two inches thick and weighed almost two pounds. In terms of total volume, it was bigger than a MacBook Air, and weighed only slightly less. Mike and I took turns carrying it in our backpacks.

Our intention was to travel to a new city whenever inspiration struck, and use Lonely Planet for hostel recommendations when we got there. But we found out about Hostelworld.com early on in the trip and it was so much better that we just used that instead.

Using Hostelworld meant using the internet, and in 2007, that meant going to internet cafes. I'm sure internet cafes don't exist anymore in any meaningful way, but they were "cafes" that had rows of desktop computers. You could rent a computer by the hour (or, ideally, by the minute) and use it to access the internet.

We welcomed any excuse to goof off on the internet for an hour or two. (We also picked laundromats on the basis of how close they were to internet cafes.)

My smartphone was useless as an internet device. It was an obsolete model that I had found on eBay for $100. But Mike's smartphone was a beast: a late-model HTC TyTN with a touchscreen, a stylus, a slide-out keyboard, and wifi. It seemed comically large at the time, compared to the tiny flip phones that were popular, but it actually had a smaller footprint than an iPhone 14.

At one point, we were sitting in a restaurant that had wifi, and we needed to access Hostelworld to change a reservation. Mike insisted that he could do this with his phone. But Windows Mobile was a pile of shit, and the phone couldn't access Hostelworld any more than it could fly itself to Mars. He spent 20 minutes fighting with the phone's web browser before finally giving up. Jacob and I made fun of him the entire time.

Our copy of Lonely Planet was still useful. It had maps, lists of tourist attractions, travel tips, and summaries of the history and culture of every country we visited.

For better or for worse, modern smartphones have made these physical travel books completely obsolete. It's interesting to think that we were some of the last people to backpack through Europe before smartphones completely changed how people travel.