Tomorrow afternoon, I’m boarding a plane at O’Hare to fly to Seattle, and then Portland, Oregon for the week-long, triennial Lohrmann Family Reunion. A ton of people (like 70, I think?) from my mom’s side of the family are assembling on the West Coast to share updates, eat Uncle John’s famous Walla Walla Washington Onion Rings, go deep sea fishing (!), and generally have a great time.

So I’ll be out of town from tomorrow, Friday, July 21st, until Sunday, July 30th. It’s a long time, made longer by this fact: I am not bringing my laptop computer.

That’s right, for the longest period I can think of in the immediate past, I am going without access to the modern wonder of magic that is Internet.

Maybe ten years ago, this would not have been a big problem. I went without Internet access all the time. Email was fairly sparse, and good exclusive Internet content (blogs) were even sparser. I could still read the paper every day and get every little piece of news I need.

But now I read close to twenty or twenty-five blogs daily. I work all day on the Internet, writing for websites that report news from the Internet. When I go home, I write for my own website, and play games on the Internet. My day-to-day life revolves (but trust me, not in a creepy way– I take lots of walks outside) around being on the Internet.

So this should be interesting. And I plan to stay chaste on purpose as much as possible, just to see what happens. If a group of my family announces they are heading into town to find a library and check email, I’ll stay at the camp. I’m not even bringing (are you sitting down for this?) my Nintendo DS. I am, I feel kind of sorry to say, bringing my cell phone, but that’s only because I have a few responsibilities that I can’t get away from for a full week. But I’ve warned everyone that they’ll have to leave a message, because it’s very likely I won’t be in range anyway.

What happens to a man off the grid in 2006? I’m about to find out. See you when I get back.

I really am looking forward to those onion rings. They are amazing, seriously. Uncle John has that recipe down.