Technology-Free Hotels
insidehook.com
insidehook.com
edit: apparently I suck at making subtle jokes. If you're ever looking for something to watch, check out The Prisoner. It has all of the above.
And they referred to each other by number, not name
Should have been bicycles. Haha.
What sort of annoyed me on my last trip was how rental apartments and hotel rooms can have a lot of though put into them in terms of design, only to ruin it with a huge black rectangle mounted on the wall in a central location. I've had to unplug the TV's in two of these during this trip just to get rid of the bright standby LED!
Wifi is useful in situations like the hotel I was in last night - not a single bar of phone reception.
The thing I do want and is often missing is a socket near the bed so I can charge my phone but still have it next to me when the alarm goes off in the morning and I listen to the radio before getting out of bed.
90%+ of my hotel nights are for business purposes though.
Few old hotel buildings will tear down walls to run Ethernet wire all over, even if just to install more access points. And if it is an old cinder block/concrete building, assume the worst.
Most of the big brand hotels in Hyatt/Hilton/Marriott/IHG had to get decent wifi installed though, using specific commercial products like Meraki and Ruckus and are subject to signal strength / bandwidth testing.
The weakness is still the puny requirements around how much up and down bandwidth the hotel brands require. They are still okay with non fiber 100Mbps down / 5Mbps up coaxial cable connections, which renders the rest of the equipment moot. But that may be because many or most hotels lack a fiber option period from the ISP.
Get a 10 ft charger cable and you never worry about this again.
Then I spent a year removing apps I do not need because as I grow older I am not proud of how many thousands of hours of my limited time on this rock I spent doom scrolling.
Eventually I ended up with one messenger, music app, a camera, a mapping app, and a browser.
Turns out, I do not even need those all the time. Started getting to where I would accidentally leave my phone at home... and did not notice.
Then I got a standalone offline digital audio player and enjoyed deciding what music to listen to again. I learned to notice signs and maps and surroundings to navigate on my own in most of my local area. I learned I can take notes on paper when I am out and research things later at home. I learned I do not actually owe it to anyone to be reachable during hours I am not being paid. I learned you can pick times and places to meet, and have a rich IRL social life outside chat rooms. I learned reading books on paper creates more focus.
I learned I could port my cell phone numbers to an old payhone that lives in my office and some old DECT landline phones around my home walk away from them when I leave to enjoy real life.
I have not used a cell phone since December 2021. I am comfortable living in my own head again and am the happiest I have ever been in my life.
Take baby steps to detox from connection addiction. You will not regret it.
Other people just do regular sports, closer to home... Cycling, tennis, basketball, soccer, whatever. Any decent sized town or city should have some kind of options.
Indoors, I like craft skills that require your hands & attention... I give myself a bit of repairing climbing/hiking gear, assorted home improvement projects, etc.
The point is, this is all stuff that intrinsically feels good, so it's rewarding on its own. I think the best choices also have a social option, so you can connect with people, at the same time.
Which mapping app?
Ever tried GrapheneOS? =]
But the idea of being on vacation and unable to watch TV or a movie, stream a video, catch up on my podcasts, stream music, chat with my friends, play a game, or get stuck in some dumb Wikipedia k-hole at 2:00 in the morning, has absolutely no appeal. Yes, a lot of that stuff could be off-loaded to being done offline. I could pre-download videos, podcasts and albums. I could pack a ton of physical books or just download my Kindle library to my Onyx Boox or my Kindle Oasis (I genuinely prefer reading on an e-reader than on paper books because I like having the ability to switch between books and I'm a fast and voracious reader who often reads multiple books at a time -- and I've been that way since I was a child), but I would still resent not having internet access or a TV on my vacation.
But that's me. For better or worse, I am a very connected person, and I don't find a ton of comfort being disconnected. I pitched a number of magazines a story about me going to one of those extreme digital detox places (that don't allow any electronic devices of any type, so no Kindle, no offline music player, nothing) and documenting my descent into madness (or maybe enlightenment) a number of years ago, but no one bit. The bottom line is, the only way I would ever do something like this, willingly, would be because it would be funny to punish myself that way and because it would be a good story to tell. But as an actual vacation prospect, no. This whole concept just makes me more anxious and stressed than if I went to a nice resort where I could delete my work apps off my phone and enjoy Instagram on the beach with a Mai Tai.