How a Tech-Lite Trip Turned Into a Reading Bender

By David Griffin Brown

My wife and I just got back from a three-week trip to Colombia to visit my father for his eighty-third birthday. Early on, when we were still planning the trip, there was some noise coming out of the Canadian government about traveling through the United States. The advice at the time: remove social media from your phone, or better yet, don’t bring a phone or laptop at all—since US border agents can search your devices.

That concern ended up being overblown, and it wasn’t the reason we did what we did. But it planted a seed. It got us thinking seriously about what it would mean to travel without constant access to screens.

We couldn’t go fully tech-free. We had house sitters looking after our dog and two cats. We needed boarding passes, Airbnb check-ins, emergency contact. A phone was unavoidable. It also helped that we’d just renewed our mobile plan and ended up with two new phones. We decided to bring one of them. Minimal apps. No social media.

Call it a tech-lite vacation.

We brought books. Physical books. We brought a deck of cards. I brought some work, but instead of loading files onto a device, I printed everything out before we left. That was it.

The trip itself broke down like this: five days in Cartagena, then the rest of the time in Pereira—coffee country. Beaches. Snorkeling. Unbelievable cloud forests. Jaw-dropping birds. Daily walks. Sightseeing. Long visits with my dad and step mother. A real vacation.

What surprised me wasn’t that the tech-lite living felt good. That part was predictable.

What surprised me was how much reading and writing we got through without trying.

I brought an old-school bound collection of five Dashiell Hammett novels. I read three of them. I am not a fast reader. 

I also brought a printed draft of the next Darling Axe craft book, Fake Query Letters by Dead Authors. It’s a playful, instructional book about querying literary agents. I read the entire thing as a final pass before it heads off to our proofreader.

On top of that, I drafted a couple of chapters of my current novel-in-progress—the sequel to We’ve Come for Your Eggs. 

My wife finished the Naomi Novik novel she’d brought with her while we were still in Cartagena. Spinning Silver. Then, thanks to an eight-hour layover in Seattle caused by an airline schedule change, we wandered the airport until we found a bookstore with more than five new releases. She bought The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

She read it. Loved it.

Partway through the trip, we ordered the sequel and had it delivered in Colombia. She started reading that. When she finished the first book, I picked it up. I finished it the day after we got home.

So, to recap:

• Three Dashiell Hammett novels

• A full proofread of Fake Query Letters by Dead Authors

• A couple of new chapters drafted

• The Name of the Wind read cover to cover

All of that happened alongside daily outings, exercise, sightseeing, family time, beaches, and travel logistics. None of it felt rushed. None of it felt forced. We just picked up a book when there was a free moment.

It turns out there are a lot of free moments when social media isn’t constantly asking for your attention.

We still checked email. I peeked at the news occasionally. Anything urgent would have reached us. Almost nothing did.

Now that we’re back, I’m keeping some of that structure. I’m removing most social media from my phone. I’ll keep it on my desktop, where it seems to function better as a tool rather than a reflex. I want to choose when I engage, finish what I need to do, and leave.

The dopamine machinery of screens is powerful. Endless updates. Endless outrage. Endless scrolling. It feels normal because everyone does it. It also eats time at a staggering rate.

Put the screen down and time reappears.

For writers, that really matters. Thinking needs space. Planning needs quiet. Writing needs attention. Reading needs long stretches without interruption.

I didn’t come back wanting to be more efficient. I came back wanting to be more deliberate—about what earns my attention, and what doesn’t. That feels like a better long-term ambition than just getting more done.

David Griffin Brown is an award-winning short fiction writer and co-author of Immersion and Emotion: The Two Pillars of Storytelling and Story Skeleton: The Classics. His debut novel, When the Sky Breaks, was released in 2025. He holds a BA in anthropology from UVic and an MFA in creative writing from UBC, and his writing has been published in literary magazines such as the Malahat Review and Grain. In 2022, he was the recipient of a New Artist grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. David founded Darling Axe Editing in 2018, and as part of his Book Broker interview series, he has compiled querying advice from over 100 literary agents. He lives in Victoria, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations.