Geeks in a vacation vacuum

Strange but true, some people -- certified techies among them -- prefer to turn it all off when they’re on holiday.

[See also: Great escapes for geeks | Top 10 vacations: Part I, Part II]

Stanton W. Schmidt writes, “I really do want to leave it all behind when I go on vacation. With that in mind I would recommend the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. There, you cannot get a signal for your cell phone, no matter which provider you have. You don't drive in, you paddle in (no boat motors allowed either). And they don't even allow you to carry in cans or bottles. And no matter where you go, you are likely not to see another human being for most of your trip.”

“I purposefully select vacation choices where it's extremely difficult to geek out every day,” replied Ed Kummel. “My last vacation was in Durango, Colo. Sure, there are coffeehouses in town that have Internet access, but the bike ride down and back up the mountain is not worth it! I learned to make do with my BlackBerry for that week!”

For those who would brave the mountain for some quality Internet time, here’s your real cold turkey, from Gregg Cooke: “The banks of West Virginia's Greenbrier River, most of which lies inside the National Radio Quiet Zone, so named because it is a 13,000-square-mile ‘hole’ in the eastern part of the state centered over the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). Even the slightest radio transmissions are hunted down by a team of radio detectives and silenced … they even find malfunctioning microwaves and mistuned automobiles. (Your tax dollars go toward this, you know.) The result is blissful radio silence for the gi-normous radio dishes the NRAO operates to scan the skies and look deep into celestial radio sources. You'll get no cell or wireless signal here, guaranteed!”