Being on vacation often reminds me of the pros and cons of technology.  We leave home and, for my own experience at least, we strip away the superfluous and bring only the essentials that help us maximize our enjoyment of the adventure.

We recently got home from a trip to France for a summer getaway, something of a reward for my daughter’s successful completion of her bilingual education in which she certified herself as a dual English & French speaking Canadian. As a bonus, she was our human translator.

…because when we went to Japan about a year ago, the little translation app in our phone played that role, often indispensably and on multiple occasions and in critical, transactional conversations.

Tech is often a modern necessity for travel, but is there a line when the tech is no longer helping but hindering the adventure? When we should throw away the phone and just use our intuition.

Sure, we used apps for transit and timely navigation, booking and checking into hotels, flights and venues.  We reserved restaurants the same way we would have used our phone a decade ago. And of course who can forget that eight hours on a jumbo jet is nigh intolerable without a well-stocked entertainment device in one’s pocket: my choice of distraction was an audiobook of a certain dungeon crawling lit-RPG duo.

But having stripped away the mundane tasks or more analog travel tools, there were some things I clung to as (for me at least) irreplaceably human: a proper camera, for one. Photography remains for me a reason to travel in itself, not some chore to snap while on vacation.

Also, a sketchbook. I know that sitting on a Parisian bench in the park scribbling ink interpretations of architecture onto the page is not everyone’s inclination, but for me it remains something that no app or algorithm is going to take away.

Conversation and our voices, real voices not translated by an app, greeting a waiter at the restaurant, saying “bonjour” when we walked through the door of a bakery, these didn’t require technology.

And I can’t forget my feet. There is something deeply human and analog about the simple act of walking—nay, wandering aimlessly—through unfamiliar city streets, something that could have been all-too-easily replaced (but wasn’t) by a taxi summons on my phone or staring at a dot on a digital map on the same screen.

Strip away the pressures of corporate urgency or work deadlines, pare down our comfort-wrapped lives by forcing us to resort to the essentials on the road—travel—and our humanity suddenly gets a little more clear.