Although we’ve been on the road for since April 25th, which makes it nearly two months, we’ve always been able to scare up an Internet connection. Unfortunately, today we left West Yellowstone and drove through the park down to Colter Bay in the Grand Tetons.
It’s a lovely campground here, but the season has started, and we had no choice of campsites. The satellite dish works well most places, but parked right up against a stand of tall pines right to the south of us makes it impossible for the poor controller to find a lock. While I’m hatching schemes to find an alternate parking place for a few minutes, long enough to download our email in the morning, at the moment, I’m stuck off-line.
Our most common fall-back is using Internet over Cell phone, but that only works in Sprint digital areas, and my ancient Sanyo has a black bar saying ‘Analog Roam’. It works for voice, but none of the fancier features work that way.
I wonder how severe this craving for connection gets. I seriously doubt I’ll be able to stay in contact while flying to Africa and camping out on safari. Certainly I won’t have a daily connection.
I’ve already started planning some backup schemes. While most activities can be put off a few days if necessary, I’ve become spoiled to nearly constant connection. What would fail without it?
At home base in Hutto, I have a Mac Mini that should be on-line constantly. This trip was a trial run for a system that would store up my usually real-time activities so that I could tap into them when I can make the connection. That should cover things like my daily comic strip fix, or checking the statistics on my website, but it won’t handle things like posting blog entries. I’ll have to think about that one.