[thomassmith65]

The 90s weren't so different, nor earlier decades, centuries. In fact, the positioning here irritates me:

  The McCanns vanished, as did Sally and Steve. It wasn’t that hard; they were living in the golden age of fugitives.

It makes it sound as though the anomaly were not the past two decades, but all of recorded history which preceded them.

[decimalenough]

No, it really was a golden age. Before the 747 kicked off the age of cheap air travel in the 1970s, it was impractical to hop around the world like the family here did. Even domestic travel in the US was slow, difficult and expensive until the train and automobiles came along.

And if you wind the clock even further back, you could hardly go further than a few villages away on foot or horseback before people would get very suspicious about an outsider venturing to their domain.