I just returned home from a week’s vacation with wife and child in a cottage in Thy on the Danish west coast. Lovely place, excellent cottage and great to be together with the family.
One thing that set this trip apart from other recent trips is that out on the moor near the sea, the connection to the wide webbed world is through EDGE network. A shake one. So no catching up on all the interesting Web stuff that I keep in Pocket for vacation reading (will Read It much Later now). No deep diving into new apps and no steamed media. Only enough bandwidth for news headlines and a couple of critical mails – everything else being a pain.
And that has been great really. So much less distraction and little things that need checking all the time. Instead full attention on being where I was and with whom; the whole experience so much more intense (in the way that eating a pre-season ice cream in a fishing town is intense).
So maybe next time I travel I should go to faraway places and hotels with no Wi-Fi, celebrating the high roaming costs. Then again, maybe not. But it has been a great vacation on shaky EDGE.