Could you lock your phone in a safe for 9 days and nights?

That’s what I did earlier this month when I boarded a cruise ship for the first time in nearly 10 years, leaving it in the cabin safe for the duration of the cruise.

During our last cruise in 2009, I did not have a smart phone. Social media barely existed. Nor did many of the apps now part of everyday life.

My then-phone did not include an international coverage option. My wife and I phoned home just once that week, using a calling card (remember them?) and then only by navigating an ancient pay phone in Cozumel, Mexico.

These days, wireless companies are happy to sell you a cruise ship package. The cruise lines provide an expensive WI-FI option or a slightly cheaper “social” WI-FI package that provides access to social media sites only. Or for $5, a cruise ship app that enables the user to check activity schedules, make dinner reservations and create a list of friends on board to instant message.

I wanted no part of any of this. Nothing against friends that post hourly updates from their vacations, including cruises, but I want less digital media in my life, especially on vacation. So I turned the phone off for the duration, even in Cozumel, which my wireless provider now includes for data and voice.

I’ve written about my frustrations with cell phones, from the people who text and scroll through social media feeds in church, yoga class, and the gym to the ones idling at stop lights in front of me long after the signal turns green. As a parent of teenagers, I worry about how screen-addicted kids will function in a world where success often depends on extended focus, deep work, and mindfulness.

So I wasn’t about to spend my nine-night cruise, including four days at sea, staring at a screen to communicate with friends and family not on the cruise and keep up with politics, sports and everything else back home.

As a result, I read three books, worked out twice a day, attended classes on meditation and juggling, watched four comedy shows, twice sung karaoke (badly), competed in two costume contests, attended a class where I made props for those costumes, interviewed five people, and learned the following four things from ditching the phone.

TIME SLOWS DOWN: Sure I was on vacation and on a cruise ship where the phone would have been useless had I not paid for WI-FI anyway. (Those who bought it found it unreliable.) But I’ve been on vacation in the USA where I’ve been guilty of checking email, sports scores, and social media. Those vacations, in many respects, seemed just as hurried and frazzled as non-vacation time.

Without a phone, I had an abundance of time since I didn’t fill all of the gaps with the phone or the Internet. I’ve succeeded at this in recent years by carrying a book everywhere I go, boosting the number of books read. Not having a phone gave me a sense of mindfulness and purpose. I improved my juggling and meditation skills, finished second in a costume contest, created a new workout, and at times found myself staring out at the ocean for 10 to 15 minute intervals.

CAMERAS WORK GREAT: Phones have replaced cameras, but this was no excuse to use a phone on the cruise either. I brought along my 9-year-old DSL camera, finally using non-automatic features consistently, perhaps because I had plenty of time to practice them. We spent plenty of time in and on the water during shore excursions, so a Go Pro camera was more than adequate and actually better than a phone camera.

Did I take fewer photos? Probably. But when you’re not looking at every moment as a recordable, sharable event, you live in the moment and enjoy it more.

WORK WON’T MISS YOU: None of us are irreplaceable at work. They can get along without you. If you have a full-time employer, there’s no reason to go without a phone on a cruise; they know you’re gone. I’m self-employed and occasionally get rush gigs that need to be done within 48 hours. I was afraid I’d miss out on a couple of those.

In reality, I missed nothing. I told my main clients I’d be gone and nothing was waiting via email or text that I could not deal with on the day I returned.

NO INFORMATION DIETS TASTE GREAT: Cruise ship cabin televisions have news channels, though we kept ours tuned to that screen that tracks the ship’s position. The sports bar on our boat featured four ESPN channels, though they were tweaked with more international programming. I did pop in a couple of times to check college basketball scores, but otherwise I missed everything that transpired during that nine-day stretch.

Actually, I didn’t miss anything.

 

 

 

 

 

I still have the blue backpack I’m wearing in this 1987 photo. I haven’t kept many things 30 years, but this pack is a reminder to live lean.

Upon graduating high school in that year, I had the great fortune to backpack through Europe. A former classmate who finished high school in Switzerland invited me to travel with him and three others. He’s on the right in this photo.

I arrived at my buddy’s home in Geneva with an overstuffed suitcase. He tossed the contents on his bed and shuffled through them, shaking his head. He presented me with the blue backpack, identical to his red one, and said everything I could take needed to fit in this pack.

For the next five weeks, the five of us – just 17 and 18 years old – traveled through France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Greece with only these packs. We slept on trains, ferries, park benches, beaches, campgrounds, and the occasional youth hostel. My companions had grown up mostly in Europe, spoke five languages between them, and we breezed through the continent on about $25 a day, a pittance even by late ‘80s standards.

Since 1987, I’ve stayed in luxury hotels, traveled the world, and spent a good chunk of my twenties living in Marriott properties. But I have never traveled as efficiently nor experienced as many things as I did in that five-week stretch.

That’s because we traveled lean. We managed with a capsule wardrobe of one pair of jeans, sneakers, light jacket, ball cap, three T-shirts, a collared shirt, two pairs of shorts, swimsuit, underwear and socks. We each carried a foam sleeping pad, a sheet, and between us hauled three tents. Throw in toiletries, decks of cards, small journal notebooks, pens, and the small cameras of the era and that accounts for everything we carried – all on our backs.

This being 1987, we carried no digital devices, just maps and Eurail passes. Our parents would not have known what country we were in on any given day. Sure, we got lost a few times, even waking up on a train one morning in Belgium instead of Germany. We drank too much on occasion but managed to avoid getting into serious trouble.

Because we traveled lean, we spent little time packing and unpacking or checking in and out of hotels. That’s because we only had our packs and managed to live, as some might suggest, one standard above homeless people.

I would argue we traveled like kings. We saw Barcelona, Paris, Nice, Lyon, Cannes, Geneva, Milan, Florence, Rome, Munich, Brussels, Athens and the Greek islands. We already were independent teenagers, but getting around Europe for five weeks took things up a notch. We lived like locals and ate like natives.

Imagine today’s helicopter parents, the ones who issue iPhones to their 11-year-olds “for safety,” sending their 17- or 18-year-olds to Europe to travel unsupervised with friends for five weeks? That would never happen even if Liam Neeson hadn’t made the “Taken” trilogy.

We’ll leave the modern child rearing discussion for another column. The lesson from our trip is that you could literally travel the world with a backpack and no itinerary. And if you could do it as a teenager, the world is your oyster.

My buddy grew up living all over the world; his parents worked for the State Department. He returned to the United States a week before college started and we were freshmen roommates. He had only a suitcase when my parents drove the two of us to school; I had a suitcase and a fan.

After spending five weeks with backpacks, that seemed like more than enough. Other kids arrived with U-hauls of dorm furnishings, clothes, and electronics.

Eventually we needed winter clothes and a few other things; we rented a small refrigerator. His parents bought him one of the earlier Apple computers, a 1987 version that used discs that were literally floppy.

But we continued to live lean. After traveling for most of the summer, making up our itinerary as we went along and grabbing food wherever, it seemed odd to go back to a school schedule and adapt to a spoon-fed life of dining halls and dorm life.

As for the blue backpack, that was not its last trip. When I graduated college in 1991, it went back to Europe on another five-week barnstorming tour. In 1998, it returned to the Greek islands on my honeymoon with my wife carrying a similar pack. We checked no bags, got off at Athens, and boarded a ferry with only our backpacks and no reservations.

Now a family of four, we take most of our vacations in the form of long driving trips where the challenge is to pack only what can fit in a minivan for a month or more. That’s a live-lean challenge of another sort.

My wife and I will celebrate our 20^th anniversary in 2018. We plan to return to the Greek islands.

Guess which backpack will be coming along?