We arrived in St.Augustine, FL late afternoon Saturday. We try and eat out on average once a week, and prepare our own meals the rest of the time. As we are driving to a restaurant, Claudette tells me “It looks like I barely have one bar of signal on my phone” I’m thinking to myself, this would be a disaster, since we just paid to be here for a full month!
I decided not to panic, and just enjoy dinner, with an ocean view, which was wonderful.
As I write this post, I am looking at the sand dunes, and right behind them, the ocean, as the last light of day goes away, and darkness sets-in early, this being the first night of “fall back” after we set our clocks back an hour.
The fact that the two of us can do our respective jobs on the road, as long as we have a working phone line and internet service is wonderful, and it allows us to be in places like we are right now.
But working on the road comes with additional planning risks, which need to be managed.
My employer provided mobile phone is on the AT&T network. Claudette’s mobile phone is on the Verizon network, and her phone doubles up as mobile hot spot, should we ever need it. We also have a Virgin Mobile broadband card, which runs on the Sprint network. Finally most campgrounds we have been at have some form of wi-fi available, as a final option. Some charge to use it, and we haven’t had to do that so far. We have tried the campground wi-fi when it is free, but generally found that transfer rates were quite disappointing.
But so far, so good…After coming back from dinner, we turned on our mobile broadband card, and checked our cell phones. Success! Strong signal on both mobile phones and the broadband card.
That said, for the places we have visited so far, Claudette’s phone consistently gets a great “4G” signal, and at times, I have had to ask her to turn her “mobile hot spot” on for me to use.
Our St-Augustine office on wheels seems ready for business on Monday morning!