Up to age 18, I had never been on a plane and the furthest I traveled was to a camp in Pennsylvania.  My kids, who are not yet 18, have already flown hundreds of thousands of miles by plane and have flown across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. But the differences are even more profound.  Staying in touch with friends when I traveled, either with my parents or to camp, consisted of a once a week phone call and more frequent postcards.  I always looked carefully to find the right postcards, those that would give a friend or family member at least some sense of what I was seeing or experiencing.  Now my younger daughter stays in touch with her friends by facetimeing them and if she borrows my wife’s iPAD, she is even facetimeing multiple friends at the same time. 

The New York blizzard of 2013 really made an impact.  With a range of snow falls that increased from about 6 inches in Manhattan, to 21 inches in my backyard on Long Island, to 30 inches in the eastern part of Long Island, there were areas even two days after the last flake hit the ground that were still impassable.