I did something the other day without even thinking about it. After parking in an underground lot in Toronto that was new to me, I took out my phone and snapped a photo of the parking spot, showing the number. Then I took a photo of the elevator door with the floor number. When the elevator brought me to street level, I turned around after walking out the door onto the street, and took one last photo of the street entry. Then I put my smartphone in my pocket, and I didn't refer to those photos again.
I call it "digital breadcrumbs" and it's an idea I first had when I was in Barcelona in the summer of 2009. My 80+-year-old mother and I were touring that fascinating city on foot when she decided that she would really like to get her hair done. A short time later I spotted a sign for a "Perruqueria" in the upper window of a downtown building. Yes, it turned out that it was a hair salon, and yes, they had someone available who could look after Mum right away. They told me she would be ready in about an hour and a half and I said I'd return then to pick her up. I took one of their business cards so that I had the name and address of the business, but as I walked away to continue my sightseeing for the intervening time, I realized that I'd better not forget my way back to the salon, because losing my mother in a foreign city would no doubt be frowned upon!
That's when I "invented" digital breadcrumbs. We weren't travelling with smartphones then, but I did have my digital camera. So first, I took a photo of the front of the building that housed the salon. Then, as I meandered through the streets of downtown Barcelona, I took a photograph of the street sign every time that I turned a corner. This way, I knew that I could just play the images back in reverse order, and they would lead me to my mother! Of course, I probably also could have taken a cab back, or asked people on the street to give me directions, or even found a police officer if really desperate, but any amount of time that I left my mother waiting past the appointed hour would certainly have increased her stress level. And considering the language difference, maintaining my own independence seemed the best idea. Yes, I could also have just pulled up a chair in one of the many outdoor cafes and sipped Sangria for that hour and a half, but considering the short time we had in Barcelona, I wanted to see as much as I could.
The truly interesting thing about taking those breadcrumb photos was that I didn't need to refer to them at all. I think two things happened. One was that I actually paid more attention to where I was BECAUSE I took the photos, and so I remembered more than I expected to. But the other aspect I think is even more significant. Because I knew that I had the back-up of the breadcrumb photos available to me if I did lose my way, I was much more relaxed about the whole thing. I wasn't obsessing over remembering each turn and each street name, because I didn't have to memorize them. But, lo and behold, when the time came, I did remember everything without even trying, and safely and quickly found my way back to my freshly-coiffed and stress-free mother.
I think that digital breadcrumbs are a handy traveller's tip, made all that much easier by the ubiquity of smartphones today. I'm pretty proud of the idea and hope that others will find it handy. It increases our skills of observation and memory while relieving us of the stress and worry of getting lost in unfamiliar territory. A winning combination.