Can it be done? In this day and age can we live without a phone or internet? The question really is, can we live without a phone or internet bill?

We are attempting to answer that question here in Puerto Rico.

A lot of our challenges in living here are self-imposed. We could easily get a phone and internet plan, for instance, however, we want to see what our needs are versus our wants. And when you just replicate the life you left, you never actually get to find out that answer. Plus by going without we learn how to find work-arounds rather than just the easy, but expensive way.

And actually in Colorado, we both had phones paid for by our work, but we haven’t had a phone bill in a long time and we weren’t too excited to start paying a subscription of $50-100/month for that service. Same thing for internet.

For internet here, we have been using WiFi at various locations throughout town as well as the open WiFi signal that we can pick up on the roof of the cabana. That worked fine, except when it would rain. I tried to be out there in the rain once under a towel, but just got soaked!

Our rainy Internet café

But overall, we have been here for over a month and I would say that in general, yes we can definitely live without a phone or internet subscription. There is nothing so pressing that we have to be tethered to a phone or internet all day long.

But occasionally it is nice to be connected. Internet needs were met pretty well, but about two weeks after we arrived I wanted to call my mom. So we kept our eyes out for a pay phone and we found one at the Econo Grocery Store in Rincón!

Public Payphone: A rare sighting nowadays

We were stoked to have a resource like this for other occasional calls we may need to make, like lining up bee removal, tile installation, labor, etc.

We made our first call to my mom using the credit card feature –against my gut feeling that we should just use change. I never like paying for something without actually knowing the bill amount. The call went fine.

A couple of days later, however my instincts turned out to be correct as we checked our bank account and saw a charge of $52 for telephonic services! Well geeze, if we were going to spend $52 on 10 minute phone call, we would just get a cell phone! We thought that must be a mistake because the rates on the payphone were like 50 cents for 5 minutes. Maybe it was a holding charge that would go away? We determined to find out, but we would need to call our bank in Colorado –using the very same pay phone! Thankfully, it was a toll free number and so we didn’t have to pay anything or give out any credit card numbers to call them.

The bank representative looked at the charge and said that it was a scam of some sort that a secondary party intercepted the credit card (debit card actually) number and charged that amount. She said they would reverse the charges in 5 business days and that we would need to get a new debit card since those numbers were compromised. What a pain! But it all worked out. The charges were reversed and a new card was sent out- to our forwarding address (Britton’s parent’s house in Greeley) since we still haven’t been able to set up mail service here (a LONG story that will hopefully be resolved soon).

The replacement card has arrived (thanks Barb for sending our mail to us general delivery), but we are supposed to activate it with our home phone -haha! Joke’s on us.  We will probably have to use that same pay phone and hope that it will work since it’s obviously not a home or cell number.

So, there have been some inconveniences especially when people ask for our phone number. It is just assumed you would have a phone. But if people really want to talk with us they just come to our house, like Rafael who sold us the blue guagua, or Dave who will be helping us with the remodeling of the wood house. We have no doorbell either, so a honk of the horn alerts us to visitors! Or people can connect with us via email or Facebook.

Every now and then Britton will have phantom cell phone vibrations from his traumatic experience with having to carry a cell phone at every moment including when he was on-call and had to sleep with it by his side. I never carried my cell phone with me since it was strictly for work purposes, so I think it has been a little easier for me to adjust to the no-phone lifestyle. We are not sure if we ever will get a phone, but for now it is working out. It is actually a really freeing feeling.

And as for phone calls to my mom in the future, we just had our first Facebook Skype session. Hey, even better than a phone call because we can see and hear each other and it’s free (thanks Laura for helping out)!

Trying to show up on Skype with my mom in the dark -the flash of the camera