I am scribbling this with a Bic Roller pen on a Mead 70-sheet piral notebook, in the front seat of a rented minivan at our campground. Our car, an '88 Plymouth Voyager (not a Behemoth 2000) blew a head gasket in Sterling, Colo., just this side of Nebraska, and we have had to finish our vacation on the cheap, renting a Windstar and sleeping in a tent.

The technology is disgraceful. You read articles about road warriors, enjoying vacations and keeping in touch with their laptops and modems. That's fine if you're sitting put at a resort in Aspen with modular phone plugs, or flying nonstop to Jamaica and dialing the Internet with the AirPhone, but murder if you're driving every day to a different tentsite, and have deadlines every Tuesday. Around Friday of every week I start getting anxious. Where will I find electrical current to plug the PC into, and where will I find a modular phone plug for my PCMCIA modem?

Forget the cigarette lighter socket. I bought one of those converters at Radio Shack. You flick two switches, one to choose between a 6 and 12 volt car battery, and the other to indicate if your computer cable is positively or negatively grounded. When I plugged mine in, trying both positive and negative alternatives, smoke formed at the plug-in. Not billows of it, just a little feathery curl. But twas enough. A not very car-smart part of me is still wondering about the possible connections between that switch and the blown head gasket the next day.

Wherever you go, the plug problem preys on you. I have stared longingly at shaver sockets in roadside rest men's rooms, imagining setting up base camp over a grimy cold spigot, only to realize people were watching me.

Driving into a new town, you look at all the businesses and wonder which one would allow you to make a 10 minute connection to the Internet to get e-mail and send work in.

Restaurants (the kind I take my family to, anyway) might have a plug adjacent to a table, but never a free phone socket. Gas stations may have a waiting area and a pay phone, but no modular socket. Hotel lobbies have both, but don't welcome smelly tenters hanging around.

You wish there really were Internet cafes in every city, like Wired Magazine says. But when I asked at one coffee shop in Durango, the woman busy baking scones just laughed at me. "This ain't the big city," she told me.

I knew that. But it seemed to me that with umpty-ump million subscribers to online services nationwide, someone nearby had access, and wouldn't mind letting me hop aboard just for ten lousy minutes. How do you locate that person when you are just passing through?

I pictured myself standing in the middle of Highway 550 with a cardboard sign with big letters saying:

NEED CELLPHONE

TO SEND EMAIL

PLEASE HELP!!

Although, to be perfectly candid, I am not sure I would know how to connect my laptop to somebody's cellular phone, and then on to the Internet. Perhaps a graduate of the Naval Academy would know how to tie a connection that complex. It is as yet beyond me.

I started asking complete strangers who looked like they were locals if they could let me on. I came this close to asking a kid on a mountain bike, "Hi, there, do you like to play games on the Internet?"

Finding a plug was not the only connectivity issue I grappled with on this vacation. Another was access codes. The night our car died in Sterling was a deadline, and we found ourselves holed up at a cloverleaf motel high in the chapparal. The phone plug was modular, so I had no trouble making a fax connection to the newspaper office. But connecting to Compuserve to send the actual text was more difficult.

Tip to travelers: write down your access numbers -- your local numbers in Denver, Omaha, wherever -- before you leave on a trip. Because if you don't have it written down, you can't call anywhere but your old local number, which is now long distance. There is no stupider thing you can do than connect long distance to the Internet through a local provider that is no longer local. Take it from someone who ran up a $778 phone bill from Ohio last February.

But back to Colorado. If you are reading this now it is because I experienced a breakthrough. The Durango Public Library, an oasis to the anxious info-traveler, is open weekdays from 9 to 5:30. Having pressed my nose to the glass two hours before it opened, I am anxiously awaiting to plug into that good Rocky Mountain electricity.

And if I should hit pay dirt, and find a phone plug or networked computer to shoot this home on, anything is possible.

[Made it, thanks to a clerk at The Silver Spur Motel in Durango.

("John Wayne Slept Here and Liked It.") They let me use Room #9

and just charged me for the long distance. Next time you're in

Durango, check it out.]

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