Another Travel Ritual I Won’t Miss

As I was reading through this week’s travel section, an item in an article by Rick Steves caught my eye. While listing what’s new in Europe this year, he mentions, almost in passing, that he has taken information about traveler’s checks out of his newest guidebook editions, because his feeling is that modern ATM networks have rendered traveler’s checks obsolete.

This comes as a relief to me. I haven’t used traveler’s checks in a long time, and it just dawned on me that maybe I never will again. I won’t miss them. Losing a wad of checks while traveling is another disaster I somehow managed to avoid, which is remarkable, because that kind of thing is right up my alley. It’s a relief to know that I may never again have to worry about keeping track of serial numbers or finding a bank that’s open on whatever saint’s day it happens to be.