It was a glorious trip, and now it's over. My two weeks in England and Italy are now nothing but a memory. My goal (other than relaxation) was to see whether it's possible to travel more than 6,000 miles and stay connected to the Net. The answer is yes, but I what I found wasn't exactly what I'd expected.

Here's my advice for traveling the world without losing touch.

Lose your laptop
A laptop is de rigueur for working on a plane or in a hotel. But if all you need is e-mail, leave it at home. I found plenty of public-access terminals in airports, hotels, and cafes. Some of London's ubiquitous red phone booths let you send e-mail for 20 pence a message. I even discovered a Web and wine bar in the walls of Volterra, a medieval Tuscan fortress city. Meanwhile, I struggled in vain to find a Wayport Wi-Fi access point in Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, despite signs everywhere telling me I could log on (for $7 a day). My notebook PC turned into a seven-pound albatross--and it was a real hassle to get through airport security.

Learn a new layout
The disadvantage to traveling sans notebook is getting used to different keyboard layouts and languages. For example, in England, they hide the @ sign over the semicolon key, instead of above the 2. In Italy, Enter is labeled Invio, and I had to press Ctrl+Alt and a third key to produce the ubiquitous @ sign. Another thing: the browser menus on the machine I used in a Pisa hotel were in Italian; to open a new browser window, I had to right-click a Web link and choose apri in un'altra finestre. (Sounds more romantic, doesn't it?)

Bring your wallet
Public Net access is more plentiful overseas, but it's also a bit more expensive. At London's Stansted Airport, I used a phone-booth-like Web terminal that cost 1 pound for 15 minutes--or about $8 an hour. This was typical of most places I encountered.

Webmail rocks
Given that I was paying for access by the second, using Mail2Web to check my messages was one of the smartest things I did. I saved a ton of money by not having to download any spam. On the downside, Mail2Web proved a tad buggy; I could never get it to sort by anything other than date, for example. Still, it was so useful, I'm thinking seriously about ditching my desktop e-mail client entirely.

You can run, but you can't hide
There we were, in a villa in the Tuscan hills, a short drive to the castle at San Gimignano. We were a mile from the nearest paved road, with no phones, no clocks, no newspapers, and a TV that spoke only Italian. The villa's only Internet connection was jealously guarded by the concierge, despite our obvious signs of Web withdrawal. And yet, one day, we received e-mail--printed out and slipped under the door--from my mother-in-law, who'd sent it via the villa's Web site. I don't know what the message said; somehow, over there, it just didn't seem as important.