Kids in my highschool used to routinely load up a VW camper van and go surfing in Baja and camping on the beach, without cellphones and without contact most of the trip. No way I'd let my kids do that today.
Side note it's crazy that today a camper van is unaffordable to the rich yet alone a budget highschool vehicle and Pacifico commercials are on TV. The future is weird.
>without cellphones and without contact most of the trip
Well, that's a big difference. Even traveling 25 years ago it was pretty accepted that, even if I were traveling with a company, I was pretty much not reachable. Among other things, I did a 10 day sea kayaking trip with a company and we'd have been totally out of communication if something had happened. I think they had VHF but it would have been--maybe if there's a ship on line of sight we could possibly reach them.
Today, I think a lot of people would have a problem with the idea that I might be incommunicado for weeks or months.
You are the one who is setting the boundaries and rules for your own life. Not being reachable for weeks or months is totally fine if that's what someone wants.
Yes, aged 8 went to boarding school. There was no phone for the kids. They did have phones for staff, obviously. In our case they’d call a parent if you broke something. But, communication was a weekly letter. We had letter writing every Sunday morning.
My parents seldom wrote back. My mother would send the occasional post-card, at which point the whole school would comment on how bad her english was.
I got a letter from my father and it was signed off:
“Love Dad
Actually, this is his secretary, but he told me to write love dad on it”
After a while there was a campaign to put phones in boarding schools, so a phone was installed. A single phone for 250 boys. There was always a queue and time was limited. On the plus side, I memorized a lot of phone numbers that I’d never know today.
Event with the phone new joiners to the school were banned from using it for the first 3 weeks on the basis they’d adapt quicker to just break the tie to parents than spend all their time moping on the phone.
When I travelled internationally in the 1990s—so maybe 30 years—I was pretty much unreachable. I’ve never had an EPIRB. And didn’t really have a routinely connected cellphone until probably 25 years ago or so when I got a Treo.
I had a cellphone earlier but it was something I used rarely.
Laptop connectivity was still pretty awful in the 1990s and even early 2000s. Conference WiFi was something of a joke. You were still often still using Dial-up. It’s probably in the last 20 years or so that cell and WiFi have become pretty much a utility in most cases. Which is a while but I remember when they weren’t.
A bunch of kids tragically died last month in baja doing this trip but with cell phones. Mexico is not the same as back in the 70s whatever some boneheaded people on this form may say about risks.
Safe to say i wouldn't send me kids to mexico on a surf trip without a cell phone.
>A bunch of kids tragically died last month in baja doing this trip but with cell phones. Mexico is not the same as back in the 70s whatever some boneheaded people on this form may say about risks.
Didn't kids also die in Mexico in 70s? You just didn't hear about it this much.
Side note it's crazy that today a camper van is unaffordable to the rich yet alone a budget highschool vehicle and Pacifico commercials are on TV. The future is weird.