Carnet de Voyage: Time Travelling

Travel notes from the real France. Carnet de Voyage is a weekly personal travel story in France sent in by readers. If you’d like to write a story for Carnet de Voyage, head here for details on how to submit.

It’s 1985 and I was in Paris, covering the Paris Air Show for an aviation magazine. I had a couple of reporter’s notebooks and a few pens in my backpack. In my wallet were some traveler’s checks (we didn’t leave home without them back then) and I navigated my way around the confusing streets of this Paris with the paper map I got at my hotel: “Avez-vous un plan de ville?” 

Over the ensuing years, advances in technology have changed traveling in a myriad of ways, making it easier, for the most part, to get from here to there and to communicate with loved ones, work colleagues and the world in general.  

For example, to make your family and friend jealous way back then (one of the top reasons to travel!), you would purchase small pieces of paper at gift shops. They had a beautiful photo of the Eiffel Tower or Tower of London on one side and room for a short message, an address and stamp on the other side. These postcards usually arrived at their destination a few days after you returned home. I do miss sitting at a café with Susan (my wife), discussing our day and comparing the amusing messages we wrote on our postcards. I don’t miss going to the post office to get stamps. 

I covered the Tour de France for a couple of days in 1988. I wrote my stories longhand in a notebook. They had typewriters (remember them?) in the press tent, but all the letters on French typewriters are in different places than the letters on American typewriters and my brain couldn’t handle it. After I wrote my story in Paris on the final day of the Tour, I headed to the post office, gave the clerk the phone number at my newspaper, was assigned a phone booth, answered the phone when it rang, was connected me to my editor, and dictated my story. It was like being in a black-and-white 1940s movie. 

Let’s skip ahead to 1999 and see yet again how technology has advanced and made communicating with people “back home” easier. I was in France again, covering the D-Day ceremonies in Normandy. I had a laptop computer that weighed about 20 pounds and was the size of a small microwave oven. And a digital camera half as big and heavy as my laptop that took about 30 photos before the memory card was full. To send my stories and photos to my editor, I had to sweet talk the hotel clerk into letting me connect to the hotel’s dial-up internet connection. It took several minutes to send a story or photo, and sometimes you had to resend because dial-up technology wasn’t fast or reliable. Let’s just say the hotel clerk wasn’t too happy. 

My current cellphone has more than 2,000 photos and videos on it and the storage is less than half full. 

I did some cycling in the Burgundy region of France earlier this year.  

All my hotels were booked weeks in advance on a website. In the old days, I’d roll (on a bike or train) into a town and head to the tourist office, where they would book you a hotel room for a small fee, or I’d wander around town looking for the youth hostel or a decent-looking, inexpensive hotel with a vacancy: “Avez-vous une chambre pour ce soir?” 

I didn’t have to write and send any travel stories on deadline on this recent trip. I did take notes, write the first drafts of my articles and posted several stories on my bikingFrance blog, all on my laptop, which weighs about two pounds. I also posted photos on my Instagram and Facebook pages. Keeping up on all my social media platforms and trying to build an audience is much more labor intensive than postcards. 

In the old days, when I arrived at a hotel, the first thing I’d ask was if the room came with a shower (many didn’t back in the 1980s) and for a paper map of the city. Now, the first thing I ask for is the WIFI code. In the town of Fumel (in 2019), I asked for the code.  

The desk clerk spelled it out slowly: “Cee … elle … eye … em … eight.” 

I punched in c-l-i-m-8 on my cellphone and … nothing. 

I tried a few more times, it didn’t work, and the clerk could sense my frustration. 

“I will write if for you,” he said and wrote: “climat” on a piece of paper. 

Aha! Eight is actually a-t. 

When I was in Burgundy, trying to find my way from the train station to my hotel or cycling in remote areas, I didn’t have WIFI access. 

No problem. 

On a previous trip, my nephew, Justin, showed me how to download offline Google maps onto my iPhone. It took several failed, frustrating attempts to figure out how to download the maps and retrieve them, but eventually I got the hang of it. I could click on them whenever and wherever I needed some directional assistance (even if I didn’t have WIFI) and the blue dot would appear, marking my location on the map. With the help of my friend the blue dot, it was a breeze to find my way from the train station to my pre-booked hotel rooms in Beaune and Dijon.  

I have no idea what’s next in terms of travel-related technology, but I hope it makes the experience easier and isn’t too complicated to figure out.  

Read our other Carnet de Voyage entries here.