This post probably won’t go online until later tonight. I’m offline in a hotel room in Corbin, KY. Note to all you travelers – when the hotel says it has “dataport”, that probably just means a place to plug in your phone cord for dialup. All the stuff we looked at did not have a way to search for high-speed internet as an amenity. Note to former Orbitz coworkers – this would be a differentiating factor!
We drove a little over halfway yesterday, from Chicago to here. It’s right around 500 miles, leaving us around another 350 to go today. I’m suppressing my natural inclination to powerdrive, and we are just going at whatever pace we feel like. Even if we don’t leave here until noon and we lope along, we’ll still be in Myrtle Beach by 6 or 7 tonight. We’ll be staying in a hotel close to the beach because we couldn’t find one in Conway that both had internet and allowed dogs. I don’t find that to be a big burden. For the first few days we can hang out and do beachy things at night. The days will be full of that unfun adult stuff, like filling out the water application, buying a new washer and dryer, possibly a new mattress. We hate the pink carpet in the master bedroom and we are going to explore the possibility of having new carpet put down in the very narrow window between when we close on the house and the stuff gets delivered. It certainly would be much easier to do it then than move all the stuff back out of the bedroom to do it later. We’ll see what kind of turnaround the carpet guys have.
All in all, things are going about as well as can be expected. I was hoping we could avoid the mistake we made coming up here, which was allocating way too much stuff to carry in the cars on the way and then having to throw it away because it wouldn’t all fit. It’s nothing to throw an extra box on the moving truck, and it can ruin your day when that same box just won’t go in the car. We actually have plenty of room, so all is well that way. The drive hasn’t been that bad so far. We’ll see how it is going through the mountains around Asheville, but I’m hoping for the best. Next stop – Myrtle Beach!
I’ve been bitten by the “high speed internet” ruse too. Uh, yeah, 56kbps ROCKS. What’s really fun is trying to ask the droid on the phone (or at the checkin desk) for even basic details about the net access. Is it wired or wireless? “Wired” OK, so Ethernet jack? “Yes, sir.” What do I find? A freaking phone jack. And then there’s no HBO. Well, you get what you pay for, right?
http://www.wiredhotels.com/
http://www.geektools.com/geektels/showstates.php?country=USA
http://www.wayport.com/hotels
http://www.wayport.net/locations
http://marriotthsia.netlinkrg.com
As expected, you’ll encounter this at the higher end hotels.
You know, I’m so happy with the way it is working out with our Linksys WAP attached to the wired internet that I can easily see it selling me one of those Airport Express doohickeys. I like the way this works, I just don’t want to have to cart the standard sized WAP around. I’m with you on frustration with folks who can’t tell the difference between the ethernet jack and the phone port.
One of the last things at work in Chicago was a training class, and the consultant we had had this GSM data thing from T-Mobile that for $10 a month gave him data wherever he had cell service. It wasn’t super fast (faster than dial up), but it was near ubiquitous. I’m thinking something like that might be a good option. If the hotel has fast access, great, use that. If not, at least you have some without having to dial up.
Oh, I forgot about that. My cell phone hooks up to my laptop (via USB) and gives me 50-100 kbps via SprintPCS’s 3G network. I used it heavily when we were out of the house during the renovation work in June. I haven’t ever used it on the road so that didn’t occur to me here. Definitely a great fallback.
Gadget pr0n: http://www.phonescoop.com/phones/phone.php?p=187