Seat of Our Pants

We all know that traveling isn’t what it used to be five, ten or fifty years ago. A lot of things have changed, some for the better, and some things are perhaps not the great improvements we once thought they’d be. Good things such as Skype (no more hyper expensive collect calls) and internet research (a mixed blessing but Google is handier than lugging around an encyclopedia) stand against things such as lightning speed proliferation of popular places (thereby flooding them with tourists) and the ability to be reached anywhere on your holiday.

Many things have gone digital and more will: the next product in line seems to be travel guidebooks. For a while now, Lonely Planet has been selling their guidebooks online on a chapter by chapter basis. Since we decided to travel to Georgia on a whim, we didn’t have time to buy a guidebook nor do much research, so we opted to buy the online chapter.

The pros are these: it’s nice to be able to buy and instantly use something that you need. It also saves weight. The cons are more plentiful: it is a total pain in the neck to access information on the fly. Try sitting on a hot park bench and start up a laptop, squinting madly at the screen to try to read it just because you haven’t memorized the street name of your next guesthouse. The pdf format is awfully slow to scroll through as well – you don’t really use a guidebook like you use a book, you want to flip back and forth between maps, glossaries and place descriptions. This doesn’t work with a pdf file. The obvious solution would be to print the pdf guides, but who wants to lug around a wad of loose leaves?

So here’s the seatsofourpants.com verdict: pdf guides may be a decent emergency option, but until they develop them into something better and more useable, old fashioned guide books are worth their weight. Go books!

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