[VAL] any interest discussing off-topic subject re:cellphones and laptops on the road?

["Tom" <thomm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

How do you plan to stay in touch on the road when traveling?  I know some
people really *want* to get lost and be by themselves but most of us still
want to touch base at least now and then usually doing so by phone.  We used
to use our telephone company calling card (are they still around?) at the
pay phone in a campground to see how everything was back at home.

But today we can even (usually) use the campground office, if not the
campsite itself, to get our electronic mail via telephone lines that have
been set up by the campground owners.  I used to look at those telephone
hookups at the camp sites and wonder why anyone who is camping would even
*want* to stay in touch.  I guess I envisioned a multi-tens-of-thousands
dollar rig with an actual telephone sitting on a kitchen counter back then.
This was prior to our own involvement with cell phones and their use on the
road for emergency calls if not for checking in  with our home base or
getting directions for our travels.

Until recently all the talk of using a laptop and a phone on the road to
keep in touch was foreign to me.  But, I have now gotten my first good
laptop to take with us in our travels.  What I had a hard time visualizing
was *how* in the world I would be able to hook up my cell phone so that I
could check Email and surf the Net.  I bought a 'thing' that would plug into
my particular cell phone which had the regular modular plug on the other end
and I *thought* this was how it was done -- insert modular plug into
computer, dial phone number to my ISP service and Voila! I'd be online.
Wrong!

What do you use -- laptop, PDA, etc -- to stay in touch with a cell phone?
A large number of us has at least one cell phone in the family today from
what I read.

What do you do and how do you do it?

Tom
WBCCI 5303