What are you stubbornly hanging onto from the past?

Very little comes to mind. I do like looking out the window on trains in an airplanes, which in the smartphone era is a bit of a lost art ....

Not that it's my thing at all anymore, but do single travelers still meet amorous partners through all of the logistics that push you together (hostel living rooms, sharing a train compartment, asking directions, running around travelers' bars and clubs, etc)?

Or are they also mediating all that through their phones?

If the latter, I think I would miss the former

@Nick

Ditto. A Thank You goes a long way!

Still take a paper back.

Still take paper crossword booklet.

Still travel carry on.

Still use a coin purse.

Still take a small digital camera. ( Canon G7x )

Still use an Oyster Card if in London

Still use a paper map if driving.

Still purchase airfare in the Spring for Fall trips

And my collection of postcards goes back to 1972.
You’d be amazed of what places once on postcards no longer exist. Fun way of documenting history.

EDIT: Allan if you travel to London be certain to explore vinyl Fridays at Spitalfields Market. Believe its the 1st and 3rd Fridays of each month.

EDIT: would still like Passports Stamps!

EDIT: Still take a deck of cards.

EDIT: Timex wristwatch that lights up when I push the stem.

That candy bars should still be 5¢

I still like a paper boarding pass. I usually load it on my phone, but never fails it times out & goes dark just as I’m getting to the head of the line…
Is it too soon to say I’m happy not to have to show my vaccination card at every venue I enter?

Paper city and road maps, paper confirmations and paper boarding passes.even if I have these things on my phone, I like having them for back up. I also always use real guide books (usually dissected). “Dinosaur”, I know…..

Cash.

I know digital and tap payment methods are easy and convenient, but that's part of my problem, they are a bit too convenient for someone like me who has never been very good at budgeting. Using cash while traveling abroad just keeps me more honest with myself in sticking to my predetermined budget. Withdrawing 200 or 300 in local currency and knowing that needs to cover me for x amount of days before I withdraw again helps me avoid the unnecessary impulse purchases I'm more susceptible to when using my tap card. On my recent trip to England last summer, no one turned down my cash and I did use tap to pay a few times, but I will hold on to paying for day to day items with cash as long as possible while traveling!

An 'old school' thing I would like to hold on to is being able to peruse a printed menu and place an order with a human server rather than having to download an app, install it, set up a user account, associate a payment method with the account, confirm that I am the payment method's authorized user, scroll through a list of items that may or may not actually be available from the kitchen, add them to a virtual shopping cart, agree or decline to join the mailing list, place the order, read the error messages when items in the order are not available as ordered, adjust the contents of the cart, and so on --

and then when the items arrive at the table I have to ask for a little extra whip anyway, and it flusters the runner, who is actually more of a customer service representative of a software developer than an aspiring chef working his way up.

Note that this works even better when the place is dark and it's hard to hear. How did we ever manage to dine before smartphones, people must be wondering?

Do still print off all the excursions with a guide, hotel and car reservations. I have my travel folder tucked into my suitcase
I don't print boarding passes.
I bring a few Euro with me to start the trip but mostly cashless.
Paper maps to go along with digital gps.
I do prefer paper books and paper guidebooks.

I still enjoy a paper newspaper, mostly to get me off of screens for a small portion of the day. And I still use paper notebooks for my travel journals. Otherwise the more that I can carry digitally, the better.

I still have paper back up with itinerary, hotels, tours, transportation. The SIM card in my year old iPhone 13 Pro max died a a couple weeks ago. If that had happened overseas, I’d be sunk getting it replaced with all my US info, contacts, map bookmarks, just about everything.

I carry one disposable paperback book; easier on my tired eyes in the evening.

I’m ready to leave the guidebooks home since everything is online. Even ripping out pages weigh a pound, so another pound saved. I over plan, so once I’m traveling, I rarely refer to the guidebook(s).

I missed my old heavy Canon film camera. Neither the not small enough Nikon nor my phone take as good of pictures but they weigh a ton less.

I still have paper back up with itinerary, hotels, tours, transportation.

We do the same. Technology is great when it works. Unfortunately, despite all it's advantages, it does fail at times. And it's usually at the worst time, so we never put all our eggs in one basket.

I still travel with the fold up tote bag that I bought in London in 1986 on my first overseas trip. It is indestructible.

At the time I bought it I thought it looked like a granny handbag and I only bought it because I needed something to carry all the things I had bought and needed to claim the tax back on at the airport.

It was marketed as a "folding shopper" but is now affectionately known as "the shocker". It is now age-appropriate. :)

Still carry: Paper boarding pass, paper map(s), paper guidebook(s), paper itinerary and confirmation e-mails, paper and metal money.

No longer carry: Non-guidebook reading (Kindle or tablet instead), point/shoot camera (phone instead).

I still bring paper travel info: hotel confirmations, boarding passes, map book/city guide/my own written notes for transportation, restaurants etc. I bring an iPad instead of paperback books. I bring a good camera. I bring some cash (equivalent of $250 Canadian) and usually use most of it.

Agree with paper maps & boarding passes. Will not use online sources for restaurant recommendations - I prefer to ask people when I'm there. Taxis, not Uber. Not fearful of cash either.

Regarding cash, love a pocketful of it, but year over year over year for the past 10 years maybe I get through it much more slowly in Europe. Feels like I used to go to the ATM every other day on a 3-week trip. No maybe I go three times? It feels like you're holding up the line if you don't just tap your card and move along.

Germans like cash though, lot a cash transactions in Germany.

My wife still picks up refrigerator magnets everywhere we go.

Every time I look at those two magnetic boards on our kitchen wall, I cannot believe we've been blessed to have been to so many cities and countries. Only place we've missed is Lisbon in Western Europe.

We don't really desire traveling in North America any longer.

So far, my wits. But no guarantees for the future.

Things that are printed out on paper.

Not using data.
Still using real 35 mm digital camera
Cash for low cost items.
Paper map usually the one issued with the Swiss Travel Pass

Agree it's nice to get away from screens once in awhile. I also like newspapers, paper maps, and guidebooks.

I like technology and embrace the newer things that make my life easier. No paperbacks - I still remember the days of carting 7-8 books with me and then paying outrageous prices to buy them in Europe. I love my Kindle now (especially since my guidebooks are also on there).

I use the camera on my phone for photos, carry modern bags, and do not carry cash - I use Apple Wallet for payment as much as I can. No paper boarding passes - I use the airline app to check in, and use Google maps (or some other digital map) always.

The ONLY thing I use that is old school is a paper notebook and pen. I always keep a travel journal and while I ultimately convert it to a digital format, I write my thoughts and plans on paper. I also plan a lot on paper, although I supplement my planning journal with online tools like Google Docs and Sheets.

Hopelessly old school here. I still take backup paper printouts of tickets, hotel info and whatnot, a paperback book, fold-out maps, and a digital camera. I also still like to use cash for a fair amount of purchases.

I still like a paper boarding pass. I usually load it on my phone, but
never fails it times out & goes dark just as I’m getting to the head
of the line…

I've converted, but my wife won't, and it's probably a good thing as during the pandemic when more than one document was required, she and many others were slowing down the line by using electronic devices. She needs gasses to read, but can't wear them to walk, so she had to fish them out and put them on to see her phone and scroll to the boarding pass. Multiply this by the number of people in line doing the same thing and the wait times suddenly skyrocket. On our way home from Scotland last year, we landed in Halifax and were were required to show three different documents 3 different times in line before getting to the customs agent. 1st was our boarding pass to show that we were in the proper line to get a connection, then our ArriveCan app-which combines customs document and vaccine passport, and then, just because it's the government which is not in the business of efficiency, we were also required to show proof of vaccine which was already on the ArriveCan app. For my wife and many others in line, that meant taking time to fish for glasses and then scrolling through their phone for 3 different documents, then taking off and putting away glasses, taking 20 steps and repeating the process X3. All 3 paper documents in hand would have been quicker.

I'm amused that people are referring to a DIGITAL camera as old school.

Allan, have your wife try these reading glasses from Eyelids. They’re tiny half glasses, look down to read, look up for to walk, watch tv. They’re so much easier than glasses on, glasses off constantly.
Kathy

Hmm. We also still send postcards from abroad, and enjoy receiving them as well. It's nice to have a treat show up in your mailbox. Its very, very impersonal to get group email or social media postings of selfies of travelers on holiday.

As much as I love my Kindle for reading books, paper guidebooks are much easier to use. However, last year, my carryon was searched because of the RS guidebook in it! Apparently TSA has concerns about thick books!

I use cash for just about all purchases other than hotels when traveling out of the country.

Still have a Levi's jean jacket from high school and a Taiga goretex trail jacket from the mid 1980's, continue wearing fanny packs (or bum bags, for sensitive Brits) since about 1989, riding a vintage 1991 Kona mountain bike without suspension, driving a manual shift 2002 Miata with analog dials, travel with a lightweight obsolete 2010 netbook to download my vacation photos every day and still enjoy eating MacDonald's french fries (even though they stopped using beef tallow in about 1990). I still own an automatic self-winding Swiss watch from seventies, but now I wear a smartwatch that records steps, miles calories, heart rate and can map where I go with built in GPS.

I'm amused that people are referring to a DIGITAL camera as old
school.

It's old school compared to the amount of people using just their phones for their snaps, Allan! Bought my first digital 20 years ago when we bought our first imac.

Okay: I am stubbornly holding on to the HOPE that things might return to "sort of like" they were pre-pandemic. That I might actually feel comfortable traveling on a plane/other mass transport, dining IN a restaurant, interfacing with a tour group, and not feeling dread/worry every time I hear someone cough repeatedly on said journey.

I clearly understand that the hope I am holding on to is just not going to materialize and that I need to "get over it."

But, you asked. So, I answered.........I am "holding on to hope."

...........all the while so very thankful for many, many journeys we took and the memories we hold dear.

(Note: please no lectures...no judgements....I am doing enough of that to myself.)

An 'old school' thing I would like to hold on to is being able to
peruse a printed menu

Yes, simply yes.

I am happy to be done with all that stuff and can’t wait until we can dispense with cash entirely.

I think it’s wise to have a paper map for back up. On my last trip I was unable to get Google maps to come up for a couple of hours and that is with data as well as Wi-Fi. I have no idea why. It happened right before we arrived in Florence, and I was very happy to have a small paper map of the city with me.

I always put everything I need to know about my trip in a Word doc and print it out. Reading it on a little phone screen is difficult and I would want a paper copy as back up. Actually in this case I mainly use the paper copy and the phone is my backup.

Paper back Books- YES! I carry one around because I know myself, I will be getting off a train/plane/bus and even if I pack my tablet 20 min before we arrive, I obsess "Did I pack it" and have to look and touch it 20 times. A book, no big loss if I did not pack it (I always pack it).

Printed out confirmations- just how my brain works and keeps my anxiety down. I have my file folder all sorted by destination with tickets, confirmations, exact requested cash in envelopes if needed, copies of Passports.

My friend is a stamp collector, so he sent a postcard to himself from the Vatican just for the stamp.

• Carry-on luggage without wheels
• Paper boarding pass as a backup (in addition to eBoarding Pass on my mobile phone)

My phone died once in Ireland. I'm glad I had paper copies. They took up little space and almost no weight. Win-win.

I am happy to be done with all that stuff and can’t wait until we can
dispense with cash entirely.

As much as I'd be perfectly happy to be done with cash, it was needed at one B and B and one bar in Scotland last year. We're also getting an 8% discount if we pay cash at our hotel in Rome in April.

I have been reading Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels since the late 80's and I still purchase them in hard cover. Out of the entire collection I have about 6 paperbacks, his first 6 novels. Eventually I hope to have all of them in hard cover.

I have an app that sends pictures as post cards. Mainly for my mom, she really enjoys receiving them.

Printed out confirmations- just how my brain works and keeps my anxiety down. I have my file folder all sorted by destination with tickets, confirmations, exact requested cash in envelopes if needed, copies of Passports.

This, except for the cash in envelopes. I need to touch things, to be sure they're there. I just printed out all the tickets and reservations for our upcoming trip to Amsterdam and London, and have them in order of need, in a zippable plastic folder a travel friend gave me (Thanks, Kim!)

Even though I'm learning to use my phone better, and am downloading many of the tickets and reservations, I still feel the need to pull out those papers, double check dates and times, and know what and where they are.

There is one ticket I don't have printed out; I ordered digital tickets for our Shakespeare play at the Wanamaker/Globe, and they won't be available until the morning of the performance. Yikes! I'm going to be spending the entire time between now and then wondering if they will show up. I do think I'm going to see if I can change the ticket order to something I can print out ahead of time.

Oh, and when we travel in the States, I still like my film SLR camera.

With reference to digital cameras being ‘old’, when we are back from a trip, I still do a photo album with a selection of printed photos. Sometimes I have been able to find a lovely keepsake album while on the trip which is an added bonus.

My wife always orders some photo books of trips Claire. They're easy to design and order online, and more affordable than you would think. I do like being able to physically pick them up and get a nostalgic browse. And it's fun to give them to the families of the kids we take along with us nowadays.

One of our travel group members always makes a physical scrapbook of her trips, and we love them!

Hank, thanks! I did a photo book once (all my photos from the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and offered through an official website so was able to use the official colours and graphics; it was great!) but I love the simplicity of individual matte photos in albums that often use archival paper. One of my albums is handmade purchased in Rome and it is a lovely keepsake. I keep my photo descriptions fairly brief so it doesn’t become unwieldy.

Hi Allan, I love several “old school “things:

screenshot paper maps for each city, using cash for the smaller transactions, not staring at a phone on the train & having conversations with people waiting for trains, having a small physical flashlight.

I am happy to no longer need the bulky transformer- just the tiny electrical adapter.

Very happy to have so many on-line resources for planning a trip! So no travel agents.
No more traveler checks!

A flip phone and a wristwatch.

(okay, its the new Samsung flip phone... but still counts as a flip phone)

With paper copies you don't need to worry if something is charged. Plus, it's easy.

And I've found scrapbooks much more interesting than looking at photos on a phone.

Have selfies been around long enough now that they are no longer 'new school'? I enjoy selfies in moderation, taking them and looking at friends and family photos on Facebook when they throw in the odd selfie while on vacation. I have always hated the traditional family photo where everyone is standing rigid in front of a site. I do think a selfie has its place in a collage of photos like you may see in a scrapbook. To me it adds to the fun and personality.

courtesy — from all those I encounter while traveling

Oh, and how about this:
jukeboxes (not even sure they were a thing in Europe)

I’m in the camp of : paper novels, stripped down guidebooks, an inexpensive watch

Paper books and tickets

No data at home or abroad

Unless not accepted, use cash for everything abroad

Have daft photos taken of me with statues

Book directly with the airline, apartment owner and the rare hotel. Use Autoeurope, though

My thirty year old, C$30 Timex glows a fuzzy warm blue in the dark when I press the crown, a clever trick an acquaintance's C$55,000 Rolex cannot perform

Clinging to the hope that common sense guts it out. It's getting a daily kicking by a pair of big-sized boots.

Several people mentioned they miss receiving postcards but not sending them. I used to put a lot of time and effort into finding postcards, stamps and places to mail them and my friends and family lined up to be on my mailing list. I spent time writing my messages, enjoying reliving my experience in my writing. I encountered the weird Italian mailing system when postcards took 6 or more weeks to arrive, everyone wanted to know if I sent them a postcard and I assured them I did. Eventually their card would arrive. One was so battered and dog eared a friend took a picture of it! We had some laughs over that. Then another time I bought postcards and stamps in a London shop not knowing I didn’t buy the Royal Mail stamps, I had bought a private mailing system stamp. In other words, “around the world before your destination” stamp, meaning the postcard went to Indonesia, Australia, etc. I’m not kidding!
By this time, I was weary of the whole thing. A travel friend told me about an app - TouchNote that sends your photos from your iPhone on a glossy card with the message you write and mails it for you. I have been using TouchNote for about 5 years now and everyone on my list loves receiving their postcards from me. I also send some to myself too.
So I have left the traditional postcards behind and have embraced my TouchNote postcard partner. I’m leaving in a month for England and so will top up my account with some money to have enough postcards.

I embrace most new things since they usually provide more convenience and make life easier. In fact, I can't think of a single thing I would go back to EXCEPT I miss the flexibility of travel from the past. I used to be able to go to Europe for 2-3 weeks and would only book a hotel for the first night. It's much harder to do that now if you don't want to pay a lot of money.

I especially don't miss having to lug 8-10 paperbacks with me so I would have something to read on the plane and train - I love my Kindle for that now!

And I do not miss traveler's checks! Tap and pay is so much more convenient and safer.

I thought this thread the other day. Family was visiting this week and they have a daughter that is 20. They were sifting through a box of old photos and she picked up a negative and asked "What IS this?".

I think the one thing I still hold onto are paper confirmations. I have everything on may phone, but want a backup. My husband has given up trying to talk me out of it;) At least I do shred them when we are home.

I used to love sending and receiving postcards. It's been years now, and I don't foresee ever doing it again. But I do have a good postcard story. Recently I was clearing out a cupboard and found a bunch of postcards sent by my sister when she took the kids to Australia, years ago. The kids were little then, but her eldest even sent one. The postcards were quite detailed and funny. I gave them to my sister and my hard ass sister got a bit tearful reading them. It was great.

I still have a Dawes Super Galaxy hand build touring bike in the cellar from 1991. In theory some day soon I'm going to saddle up and go cycle down the Loire Valley.... that theory has been on the planning board for over thirty years now.....

Andrea,
My Mother passed away in 2017 and I had discovered she had saved all the postcards I had sent her over the years. They help me remember my trips and how much my Mother loved me. A treasure trove!❤️

I still print out boarding passes and my itinerary.
I do have them on my phone too, but like the backup.
I take a couple of old paperbacks for reading material and I still bring a camera, depending on where I’m going.
If I’ve been to a place before, I leave the camera at home.

I also like the paper boarding passes and paper maps, along with a paper itinerary and tickets. Maybe a RS paperback.

It's a tactile thing with me, and the paper takes up almost no space and weighs next to nothing.

My husband puts our trips day by day in a Google Sheet. Somehow, despite using spreadsheets myself, I can't seem to grasp the information listed that way.

I put the exact same stuff in a Word document or a Google Doc, but that still seems weirdly "list-y" and I can't quite "see" what's going on as a whole.

We have much of this trip data also on our Google Calendar, using various colors. This helps. Still....

I make a paper calendar with big squares for each day and write in each where we'll be and what we want to be doing ----- aaaaaaaaah, that's what I need. NOW, the trip makes sense finally. I can see the whole thing, five weeks worth, laid out. And I don't even use a paper calendar in my regular, at-home life.

It seems silly to have the same trip facts in quadruplicate like this, but that's the way it is.

I’ve been using the TripIt app the past several trips, but for our upcoming one, I’m just going back to the Excel spreadsheet. One two-sided paper gives me everything I need to know.

nancy58, I guess we're old school. Despite Google Calendar et. al. I still write things down on the squares of a calendar and prefer that. Kids, nowadays. Get off my lawn!

Old currency, eg, West German DM, especially the 10 DM and the 20 DM bills, French franc coins and German one DM coins, postcards sent to me by my family (the folks, etc), and the tons of postcards I sent home from Europe. They serve as evidence.

Maps of Central Europe, bilingual German/Polish maps, Michelin regional maps of France, old passports going back to 1971. Plus, the boarding passes since 1995, all of which show that I've escaped the SSSS unpleasantness.

those postcard anecdotes tugged at a heartstring, I must say -- I too switched to TouchNote and feel ok about it, but today I happened to be cleaning up in the kitchen and found some handwritten recipes from people who are no longer with us, and I had a flash that the convenience of being able to look up anything on the WWW and get as many versions of a recipe as you can handle immediately has a different value than seeing my aunt's handwriting.

I still bring a camera, depending on where I’m going.

I don't think a trip goes by that I haven't hummed and hawed about bringing a camera instead of my phone. The zoom on my phone can't replace the camera. But in the end the convenience of the phone wins out. If I ever do a Safari or Antarctica though, I'm thinking I'll need the zoom of the camera.

Guidebooks are heavy and I'm a hard-core minimalist packer (maybe not compared to a few others who post here).

I don't like digital guidebooks because it's too hard to find what I want, when I want it. It's probably related to my lack of expertise with digital books. I once played with removing parts of the book to lighten my load. My answer now is to get the current paperback, study it, then photograph the specific pages I want to reference during the trip on my phone. Having them in my gallery eliminates the weight and they're in the order that I'll want to reference them on my trip.

I had to really think about this one.......

But the one thing BOOMERS do is use a digital camera like an old film camera.

There is no reason for anymore to frame their subject by turning the camera left or right hand, to go from Landscape to Portrait.

I have broken this habit, but my wife has not. So we get home and are editing the photos, and her sets have to be rotated on nearly half the photos as we just view these on a display any way.

This forum

Bringing too many US dollars and even local currency for our trips. Usually bring home most of the US dollars, although $1 bills are useful for simple tips. It is a game to spend all the foreign currency down to the last penny. Do keep euros for the next trip, but not many. Travelers checks died years ago! Credit and debit cards with no foreign fees are indispensable today.

My answer now is to get the current paperback, study it, then
photograph the specific pages I want to reference during the trip on
my phone.

I do that to. Not to photograph multiple pages such as an RS walking tour, but maybe the 1st page of a site that gives tips on the best ticket gate to use or a reminder of how to buy a train ticket in (fill in the blank).

How I traveled 40-50 years ago is archaic and I don’t “stubbornly hang on”. To the degree I’m comfortable with technology I embrace it. It may be hard to accept but life is different in Europe today. RS was a small time guy decades ago. The Paris I visited in wonderment in 1973 is still a memorable place. Life goes on.

All the agonizing about strategy for buying advance tkts for everything, finding the “best”, “must see” or whatever is a needless response to the past or present. I may plan a destination but neither old habits or new technologies are an excuse to plan every waking moment down to the minute.

We all need to lighten up sometimes.

"What are you stubbornly hanging onto from the past?"

Courtesy, civility, etiquette.

“I like technology and embrace the newer things that make my life easier”

Same, you took the words right out of my mouth Mardee.

avirosemail, Where in the SF Bay Area is a restaurant like you described? I have never seen one like that anywhere.

"What are you stubbornly hanging onto from the past?"

The Alphabet Game ... but it may need a final visit to the vets soon...

@Racquet588, if you’re giving US dollars as tips to people in Europe, it’s not something they want. It would be similar to giving a worker in the US a British pound. It’s not cost-effective or convenient to even try to exchange it for a currency they can utilize.

I use US $1 bills in US at airport transports and tolls and tipping in the airport, not overseas. Also useful when cruising the Caribbean.