Nostalgia? Here's how we decided bets pre-Google

Picture it. Somewhere in the Utah desert, 1995.

My best friend and I were in the middle of an epic US road trip when, in a stunning feat of conversational improbability, we found ourselves arguing about the German term „Harzer Roller“. I said it was the name of both a bird and a cheese, he said I was full of shit.

He had a point, but I was feeling cocky.

Now, today, this would be solved in literally 10 seconds by pulling out a phone and googling it right then and there.

There. Done. Bragging rights awarded.

Worst case scenario, there's no cell phone reception in the desert and you have to wait until you're back in range. The horror!

I know, kitty.

But this was 1995, so what happened was this:

Absolutely nothing.

In fact, not even a tumbleweed (that would have been awesome, though).

I mean, it was 1995. Definitely no smartphones. The first internet cafés only just cropping up in a handful of major cities. Google wouldn't be invented until two years later, but it didn't even matter because there was barely anything on the internet to begin with. Certainly not a German encyclopedia.

Yeah, Jim. Oh.

So after we made the bet, we simply spent another 3 weeks and 3,000 miles on the road, then he went off to uni in Washington State and I flew back home to Germany (not without first missing my bus to Vancouver Airport because I wasn't paying attention when it drove off right behind me and having to spend $50 on a cab to "Follow that bus!", which at least paid for the day's entertainment for both Greyhound passengers and border police).

I didn’t own an encyclopedia but my parents did. Since the bet wasn’t exactly urgent business, I waited until Christmas rolled around and went on the 8 hour train ride back to my hometown ...

... where these bad boys were dustily waiting for me:

I looked up „Harzer Roller“ and made a photocopy of the entry. Easy!

Oh wait, no, I didn’t.

Because in 1995, my hometown of 30,000 people did not yet have a copy shop.

So my mom, who worked as a secretary, lugged five pounds of „H - IK“ to the office and made the copy for me.

Then I wrote a letter, added the photocopied „Harzer Roller“ page, and sent everything off via airmail to my friend in the US in January of 1996.

So there you have it:

Instead of 10 seconds of googling on a smartphone right then and there, it took half a year, a rental car, a $50 cab, a bus, a plane, a train, my mom, another plane and approximately 14,000 miles to decide our bet.

But do you want to know the one thing that truly matters about this story?

The one memory that still warms my heart after all these years?

The real takeaway from this modern re-telling of ancient irrelevancies?

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Tl;dr: Slowly and involving copious amounts of transportation.

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[I totally first posted this a couple years ago but seeing all the 90s nostalgia tech posts this week reminded me of it.]