Tech and Travel

I'm not an old man, not really, but sometimes I feel like I can't quite keep up with change in the world. Our recent vacation was an anomaly for us. Usually we're headed to a known place on a known schedule. The most challenging decisions we make are where to stop for gas. We're a predictable bunch. This time we decided to fly a bit looser with our schedule and see what we could see. We knew when we had to be in Orlando, but we had three days to get there. We drove a bit, stopped a bit, ate a bit, and our first day ran out. In the past this would be the part of the day where we'd start pulling off the freeway at every stop and searching out hotels that would accomodate six people. This is not a fun thing, and in the past has ranged from hitting it on the first hotel, to discovering that we're in a state where the fire marshal has declared that under no circumstances can more than five people be in one room ever. While I was dreading this and looking for a good exit, my wife calmly pulled out her phone, and let her maps program show her exactly where we were. She then did a search on the town in front of us for hotels. She popped on over to a web site or two and found a hotel with a suite that would sleep six. While still online, she made the reservation and told her maps program to alert us when the exit came up.
My wife the magician.

The healthy ones. 

It gets better.
The next day I'm driving along thinking that the world is an amazing place. We're driving, stopping, eating, stopping more, having a good time. Most of us are having a good time. My daughter is getting slower and slower and redder and redder. She's sick. Her throat hurts. Crap. There's a high likelihood that she's managed to contract the same strep throat that my wife had the week before.
This is bad.
Like, really bad.
My wife calmly puts on her wizard hat and pulls out her phone again. Within 10 minutes she's located the closest town with a walk in clinic that's open first thing the next morning. She's also located a hotel three blocks from there with a room that will sleep six right on the beach. Everything is plotted on the map. We can wake up and she'll take one sick child to the doctor while I take three healthy ones out for a shell collecting walk on the beach.
Despite a growing concern that my wife may be able to turn me into a toad with her phone, I'm ecstatic.
This magic phone has completely changed travel. I won't even go into the Disney maps that showed us right where we were and where the rides were and how long the wait times were for each and where the restaurants were and what they served. I won't discuss that, but it was equally amazing.
I only bought a cell phone about 6 or 7 years ago after an incident with a broken Volvo. The phone I have is not smart, though it may still be smarter than me. I haven't really figured out how to text on it yet or program in numbers or retrieve voice mail. I thought I wasn't ready for a smart phone, but after watching what one can do, I'm not sure I'm ready to not have one.