We have brought our laptop with us - for a longer trip. We used it primarily to save our photos. However we did use it for e-mail. You don't need AOL if you just want to use your mail email account. Our ISP has a net-mail version of our account (Sympatico) so ask your major ISPs about that. We found that netcafes and hotels that let us plug our laptop into their network. If you do this, you can use portable free mail accounts like Yahoo Mail, Fastmail or Hotmail, etc.

There are independent roaming services available as well. Sorry, though, I haven't personally used them. http://www.net4nowt.com/support/isp_roaming.asp http://www.net2roam.com/ http://www.go2roam.com/

Frances Toronto, Canada