Last week, my family and I spent a few days in a cottage about 15 miles from Rhinelander. It was my first "Up North" vacation which was long overdue considering I lived in this state my entire life and heard dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people mention their plans to trek to those parts. Apparently, going Up North is one of the activities we Wisconsinites do best, after playing Sheepshead and par-boiling brats.

Anyway, in honor of this rural pilgrimage and because I had not left the grind of my daily life in a couple of years, I decided to try to totally disconnect from the rest of the world by leaving my laptop at home. Plus, I actually thought that being deep in the North Woods would compromise my iPhone service and untangle me from its trappings.

Silly me.

Turns out, even though the unincorporated town sported more loons than human beings, my iPhone remained four-bars strong. Determined to unplug, I turned it off for the first day, and although I had fun munching meat sticks and letting minnows nibble on my ankles, I occasionally craved cyber communication. However, I held strong and flew through a tweet-free day.

The next afternoon, however, I uploaded a photo or three to Facebook and then, while sitting around a fire during the early evening, I simultaneously roasted a pink marshmallow while reading my work e-mail.

"I'm throwing that thing in the lake," my husband said.

The sheer thought of my shiny black lifeline plummeting to the bottom of the deep, dark lake was almost more than I could imagine. In my mind, I saw myself diving in after it, as if it were a diamond broach or a newborn mewing kitten.

I don't know what has happened to me or when I became such a techie. In college, I stubbornly banged away on old Underwood typewriters instead of word processors, and just this winter I claimed I didn't want an iPhone.

Finally, I turned it off until the drive home -- but by "drive home" I mean I updated my status before we drove off the cottage's wooded driveway.