On small islands
Tonight I leave the Low Country on a plane for a short holiday on Lanzarote, a (hopefully) sunny island part of the Canary Islands.
It's quite amazing what you can find out about your holiday destination on the Internet these days. I've been able to extrapolate the weather and monitor it real-time, visit Flickr to have a look at what kind of pictures I can take, have a look at satellite imagery of the island. You can check what the in flight movie is, and at what time the sun rises or sets. You can read whole reports of people that went there before you, describing all there is to see and do, and what to eat.
But I didn't look at any of it, except the satellite imagery. I like to be surprised, and the total information overload of the internet completely destroys the whole point of a vacation abroad: Being someplace you don't know much about. Well, that's the point to me anyway.