Jaunted

Then it was off to Berlin shortly after, and we painfully resisted the sweet feeling of purchasing guidebooks. Instead, we stuck with only a Berlin Moleskine City Notebook and a fold-out map. The weight was literally lifted, and we couldn't go back to hauling a bookshelf.

Skip ahead a few trips and we're off to London, Bruges and Edinburgh in one fell swoop. Since we had already gone through guidebook withdrawal in Berlin, we managed to travel through Europe with only a London Moleskine City Notebook. That was all. So now you ask, how did we know where we were going and what to see?

The solution: With only one small book in our bag, there was plenty room for our larger, freshly-upgraded camera and laptop. Replacing the guidebooks and maps was our iPhone, but you can just as easily use any other smartphone with a large display and easy internet browsing.

Our actual snapshots: finding free wifi and finding our way to a store in London

We stayed in hotels with free wifi (find tons of those listed here), and vegged-out with the internet on our phone before heading back out into the city. We used Google Maps to find the places we wanted to go or the neighborhoods we wanted to wander, and then saved a snapshot of the map into our pictures on the iPhone. We turned to Yelp for recommendations, official sites of tourist landmarks for details on them, and even Twitter.

When you're traveling in a major world city, there will also be free WiFi spots around to hook onto in case you need information right then. We downloaded an iPhone app called "Global Free Wifi," and otherwise just kept our eyes open for WiFi signs on storefronts. Our new, guidebook and map-less travel philosophy even worked in the medieval town of Bruges, Belgium. We dare you to try to shed the extras on your next trip; that is, unless you're headed into rural areas where Wifi is more likely to be someone's name than anything to do with the internet.

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· London Field Trip [Jaunted]
· Guidebook news [Jaunted]

[Photo: Jaunted]