The last few weeks I realized how much I use and rely on the Internet, not just for keeping up with friends and uploading photos of my food. I also use it for directions and to locate new places to eat. 

While I was in South America the last few weeks I had purchased an international data plan for my phone and I’m glad I did. There was a good amount of wifi cafe’s and restaurants but for the most part they were slow and unreliable. I didn’t just want to upload photos and make everyone jealous of where I was at but because Maeve and I found ourselves walking around quite often not sure where we were or where to go. Our initial thought for this was to pull out our iPhones and look at the map and maybe pull up Yelp for a place to eat. The international data plan made this fairly easy but there was no Yelp in South America and Apple maps proved to be an issue since most the time the directions were wrong. Our best app for finding a place to eat and for directions was Foursquare. Manny places on foursquare had photos and tips along with them on what to try. The maps in Foursquare were great too, the locations and cross streets of places were correct making them easy to find. Sure we could of blindly went into different restaurants and did that a couple times but to tell you the truth, those places were mostly a disappointment. I’d much rather have a recommendation on a location then nothing at all. So for me being unplugged from the internet and social sites really isn’t an option moving forward and I know any traveling I do in the future I’ll be using Foursquare or something like that to make finding great places easier.