From the Editor’s Desk: Can You Hear Me Now? (Premium)

We've traveled internationally for decades, mostly to Europe, but semi-exclusively to Mexico City for the past three years. There are so many ways by which those experiences can be cataloged, but one of the more interesting---to me, at least---is using the technological advances that have occurred during this time. And none have had a more profound effect, to date, than phones.

That sounds obvious. But I'm old enough to remember waiting until the weekend to make long-distance phone calls. Forced to use the car phone in my boss's truck in 1985, I was admonished because just picking up the handset triggered an expensive charge. And I recall driving to work in the early 1990s behind what appeared to be a drunk driver, only to pull up next to the vehicle and see that the driver was talking on a cell phone, swerving all over the road in a way that would become common decades later. He was probably a doctor. Few others could afford such a thing then.

My wife and I first visited Europe in the early 1990s, twice, thanks to my father, who lived in London for several years and paid for the trips. On the second of these trips, we also visited Paris and Ireland on separate side trips with my youngest sister. We booked the hotel in Paris using the fax machine at my father's office. And on the trip to Ireland, we booked our first bed and breakfast---the 20th-century version of an Airbnb---using a pay phone overlooking Dublin Bay.

By the time we returned to Europe in 2003, a work trip to Germany that my wife and I turned into a longer stay, we had young kids and were living outside of Boston near the rest of our families. Before the trip, we rented a Nokia cell phone so that we could stay in contact with our kids, who were staying with Stephanie's parents. To make that happen, we had to drive into East Boston, and we used a Mapquest printout to find the place. But I will never forget the miracle of us speeding down the Autobahn in Germany while I spoke to our son Mark, who is deaf, using this tiny phone. Technology often fails me. But every once in a while you're reminded of how and why it can be life-changing in a good way too.

That trip to Germany spawned over 15 years of regular travel to Europe, for home swaps and otherwise. And phones became an ever-bigger part of those trips. We bought our own little Nokia phone, figuring it would be cheaper to own one than rent them every time we traveled. And then we didn't really need it anyway because phones advanced so quickly: In 2007, the iPhone arrived, and I brought it to Paris that summer during our second home swap, scared to death to even turn it on because reports of early iPhone users returning home from Europe with foot-high paper bills and several thousand dollars in charges were already common. The issue was that the iPhone had no sense of roaming let alone international usage, and aside from using the then-new free Wi-Fi that the city had begun supplying, I kept the iPhone locked down...