When Mary Joy got her first smartphone, many years ago, when we travelled abroad, we paid $40 for a Verizon international plan that gave us 100 phone minutes, 100 outgoing texts and 100 MB of data. This was enough for us: we used the phone to call Mary Joy's mother. Otherwise, we used wifi for internet connection, either on the phone or on my iPad. My cell phone was a stupidphone, which I didn't bring along. On our last trip to Europe, in 2019, the price for this plan had gone up to $70.
This year was entirely different. The price was now $100 per line, but what was included for that price was substantially better: 250 talk minutes, 250 texts, 5 GB of data. Last year, I finally broke down and got an iPhone SE. We decided to pay for two lines (a total of $200 for the trip), under the assumption that we would now find, given the increased onlinedness of the world since the arrival of COVID-19, that having those 10 gigs of data would be useful, if not necessary. That assumption was correct. There were a number of times when we needed to use GPS. Admission tickets for museums, etc., train tickets, etc., when we showed up with paper tickets, we surprised the ticket-takers, and sometimes we had no choice but to bring up QRs on our phones, like everyone else (for instance, I temporarily misplaced one of our Sagrada Familia tickets--printed back in the U.S.--so I had to rush frantically to bring it up online. I left the iPad at home (I didn't intend to do any writing during this trip).
I also used the iPhone as a backup camera. I have always had "real" cameras on trips. On our India trip in 2015, I had my "point-and-click" camera, but the gorgeous pictures that our guide, Sudha, got with his Nikon DSLR, sharing them with the group, provoked a severe case of camera envy, so I upgraded to a Canon EOS Rebel SL1. On this trip, instead of using the standard kit 17-55 mm. zoom lens that I've generally used, I experimented with bringing only my "nifty fifty" 50 mm. f/1.8 fixed lens. This is much less versatile, sometimes not allowing me to get everything into a picture that I wanted. On the other hand, the wider aperture allowed for sharper pictures, especially in lower light. I had that lens along on our 2016 Adriatic tour, and I switched it in to great effect in the Postojna Caves in Slovenia, where no flashes were allowed. It is not very useful for landscapes, where you want wide angles and depth of field. I wanted very much to get a picture of the whole façade of Girona Cathedral, for the "Game of Thrones" fans, but the plaza in front wasn't deep enough that I could step back and get it all in, using the 50 mm. lens. So, I took the picture with my iPhone. I used the phone camera in some other situations where I wanted a wider angle, as well as in situations where I didn't want to bring the camera along, as too obtrusive in social context.
I think that, on the whole, I got some nice pictures with the 50 mm. that wouldn't have been as nice with the zoom.
When you spend a lot of time out in the sun, it is a good idea to wear a hat. When I went to Mexico for the first time, in November 1988, I bought a broad-brimmed straw hat at the market in Puerto Vallarta. I wore that hat on that trip, and also two months later, when I went to El Salvador and Nicaragua on a Center for Global Education tour. Unfortunately, that hat was wrecked by shifting luggage in an overhead bin on the way back to Minnesota.
Two years later, I bought a canvas hat, something like the famous Tilley hat, but cheaper, at a mall in Naples, Florida. That hat accompanied me all over Europe, to China and India, to Mexico numerous times and to various parts of the U.S., until, after about a quarter-century, the chinstrap wore out, and I thought: "Why not buy a genuine Tilley hat?" But after wearing the new hat on a few trips, I decided that I preferred the faux-Tilley to the real one: the brim was stiffer and it didn't ride my ears. So, I switched out the chinstrap, and on this trip I was back with the veteran hat, in place of the rookie.
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