Potts: “I’m Struck By How Much Travel Has Changed Since 1994”
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 08.29.06 | 8:06 AM ET
Twelve years ago Rolf Potts set out on his first long-term excursion, an eight-month road trip through the United States and Canada. “I navigated with paper maps, got my information from a single Let’s Go: USA guidebook, and met people at random,” he writes in his latest Yahoo! Traveling Light column. Now, with GPS and Lonely Planet on PlayStation Portable and CouchSurfing and TripAdvisor and more travel-planning information available online than anyone could possibly read, travel has evolved. But it’s not necessarily less “pure.”
Potts writes:
Before I get too wistful about the “purer” travel conditions of 1994, however, I’ll admit that travel has always been getting easier and more accessible. In the 19th century, people claimed that the efficiency of the steamship had destroyed the romance of sailboat travel; in the 15th century, coach carriages were ridiculed as a wimpy alternative to going it on horseback. No doubt when Marco Polo first headed east as a teenager, his father and uncle continually reminded him that the Sogdian bandits weren’t nearly as fierce, nor the sirocco sandstorms as severe as when they first traveled to Asia.
Potts lists five major changes of the last dozen years, including the rise of e-mail and iPods.
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
