After ten days on the road in our motorhome, we take a break from driving, do some laundry, and try to catch up on our work. If only the WiFi worked.
The campground, La Fanal, was quiet overnight except for a certain black cat waking us up at some godawful hour. He was so annoying, I swear we were close to renaming this website ‘CamperCat.com’! Needless to say, we were up early (on our day off no less) because we couldn’t sleep anymore. Our plan for the day was to hunker down at the campground, do laundry and get some work done.
First order of business: laundry. The laundry machines at La Fanal take specific tokens (5€ wash, 4€ dry) so Alison did two loads of wash and used one dryer token. Unfortunately, the dryer didn’t dry everything so we still had a fair amount of wet stuff to dry out.
Back at Amelia, I rigged up an outdoor clothesline along one side of the machine and then out to one of the awning’s legs. I dug out the clothes pins and everything was up and drying shortly afterwards. Technically, I’m not sure we were allowed to do this, but in the end, no one seemed to care and it all worked out.
Laundry day in Amelia
The WiFi is another matter.
After paying 20€ and being assured it would work throughout the campground, the WiFi doesn’t work at our campsite. Lack of decent internet connectivity is a constant source of frustration as we both need the internet to get things done. For me, I need to work on some client sites (namely all of them!) and upload videos to YouTube. Alison also needs access to write the newsletter, create new posts, communicate with clients, and numerous other things.
We tried moving closer to the main building and sitting at a picnic table nearby, but the WiFi still didn’t work well. We drove Amelia down to the front parking area, but the lady at the desk didn’t like us parking there and the WiFi wasn’t great anyway. It seems that unless you are on top of the building, the WiFi is useless. If I hadn’t broken our WiFi boosting system on day 10, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad. But it was broken and we were getting desperate.
I took my complaint to the front desk where the staff gave us access to the TV room in the building. There were no tables, just some Ikea chairs, but we could access the WiFi. Even then, we still couldn’t access the internet. I convinced the staff to reboot the router and then we were online. But it was slow. Very slow. Uploading a short video to YouTube took me hours.
A few campground regulars stopped by to see if we would join them in a drink
Of course we agreed but they were a bit stand-offish
Obviously, access to the internet is going to be a constant source of frustration. As digital nomads, internet is critical for our business and lifestyle. We had it good in Belgium, but now we’re just going to have to find a way to make do.
We finished the day working from the TV room. We planned to go back after supper, however, Alison was tired (perhaps due to an early wake-up call?), so we decided to get up early-ish the next morning and work.
Not our best day, but on the upside it was the first one in a while we didn’t have to pack up the motorhome, drive somewhere, and then have to find a place to stay. Then again, maybe we would have found better internet access…
Andrew
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