Cutting through Canada for two-hundred miles is the easiest way to drive from my home in Connecticut to my wife’s grandparents’ homes in Michigan.

This spring, I was excited to take the drive to introduce my newborn daughter to her three living great-grandparents until I realized that my cell phone’s data plan stops at the United States border.

We didn’t want to pay international roaming charges so we went into the trip with the full knowledge that we’d be going dark for nearly two-hundred miles each way.

The plan was to stay overnight at a hotel on the Canadian side of the border with a view overlooking the legendary falls.

We turned our phones on airport mode at the border, took a left-hand turn, went through one roundabout and were immediately lost.

Not lost in the traditional sense, as I tried to convince my wife, just lost in the modern sense of not having the immediate validation from a GPS system that you’re where you’re supposed to be.

I readily admit that my dependence on GPS has made it so that I haven’t known where I am for over twelve years, but I was surprised how much the lack of real-time updates impacted my confidence on the road.

I couldn’t help but contrast the experience to my earlier adventures as a nineteen-year-old barreling alone through remote stretches of the Catskill Mountains at 1:30 in the morning in a twelve-year-old Buick that shook when you hit 55 and didn’t always keep its engine running when confronted with red lights.

Is technology helping me to live my life freer or am I becoming more reliant?

That old Buick nearly killed me once coming home from my freshman year of college with every item that I owned inside it. The whole wheel seized up just over the Connecticut line. I somehow wrestled it to an exit ramp where the smoldering serpentine belt burst into flames.

A shirtless man came out of the bushes to douse the flames (presumably with his shirt), then disappeared before I could thank him because the cops were showing up.

I towed the car to a garage that fixed the part then kept driving the car through steep and icy conditions for another year.

My Candadian trip involved far less impulsiveness than my independent trips between college and home, and a significantly safer car, but nearly left me stranded and penniless nonetheless.

While we had planned for radio silence on the cell phone front, I completely overlooked how my financial institutions would react.

Putting a same-day reservation for a hotel room overlooking Niagara Falls gave my credit card company a panic attack.

When I didn’t return their fraud prevention calls (since my phone was on airplane mode) they put a hold on future charges.

Before I figured this out, I used my debit card to buy breakfast the next day, giving my bank a similar panic attack and necessitating another hold.

This all came together for me a hundred miles past the border at a rest stop where neither of my cards were approved for gas and lunch.

Suddenly, for the first time since high school, I was out in the world with the money in my pockets as the only means to fall back on to ensure I’d make it home.

And my money was of the wrong denomination, which I learned Canadian retailers will take so long as you’re ok with getting your change in Canadian currency.

There was a time when making ballpark approximations based on a map and relying only on the money in my pocket were signs of freedom but after distracting myself trying to read the tiny kilometer-per-hour lines on my speedometer, they were the sources of my apprehension.

It’s amazing how quickly our social fabrics come unwound. It only took half of my first road trip as a father to find myself driving down a rural stretch of highway in a foreign country at an uncertain speed with a pocketful of money I don’t know how to spend and absolutely no idea if I’ve already missed my turn.

But we were never really lost. I swear. At least not in the traditional sense. We were always somewhere on the map. We just couldn’t see it.

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