Tales of Woe and Internet Connectivity

I was reasonably optimistic when we hit the road about being able to log on almost daily. It seemed that most of the RV parks boasted Internet connections, plus there was always Starbucks for a wireless connection - why, we just had to pull up outside and connect.

Reality was very different.

I was spoiled the first time we connected in Las Vegas. We used the business center in Circus Circus who charged us $5 to use their broadband connection. I was flustered for awhile sending my email with their SMTP address; I forget what exactly I had to do, but it was and Outlook issue and I killed about half an hour of time debugging it. The price was not significant, and they let both Sarah and I use our laptops for the same fee.

After that just about every connection we had was dialup, so we always used Earthlink. Before the trip I printed out all the access numbers for every state we would be in (excluding California). This was a surprisingly short list, but included a local number for every place we were planning to be.

Connectivity was universally a phone jack in the corner of a room, usually the campground's laundry room but sometimes a table in the corner of the game room or store. Most places didn't charge for the local access call, but if they did it was a buck or two. They also all requested that you limit your use to checking email for a maximum of 10 or 20 minutes, though that was never enforced because there was never anyone waiting. They usually had the local access numbers for AOL and Earthlink written on a post-it stuck to the wall.

Not including the hotel in Jackson (in-room phone connection), the Kitchener's house (home connection) or Black Rock Desert (no connections for 100 miles in any direction), nine of the campgrounds had connections available and six did not. None of the National Park campgrounds have connections, Zion didn't even have showers.

Of the nine that had connections, we tried to use seven of them. Two of them didn't work at all. The receiving modem in Rock Springs, WY, was busted, so although we could connect, we would only get an error back. The phone line in Winnemucca, NV, was flat out dead. The first night when we tried to use it, the lady behind the counter told us it must not be working because the Internet might be down. The next morning they told us it wasn't working because the storms to the east and west might have knocked it out - this despite the fact that their office phone and credit card line were all working fine. They really didn't have a clue.

In Fernly, CA, the only place with a connection was the Truck Stop Inn, a truck stop on Hwy 80. They had a kiosk that charged $0.25/minute. This was fine, but if you don't read the fine print you find out that the minimum credit card charge is $3.00 (I logged in the first time for three minutes for $3.00). What isn't in the fine print or anywhere else is that they charge in $3.00 increments, and they seem to do it every five minutes instead of every twelve minutes. The good news is that there were multiple ports on the kiosk, so we could plug in with an ethernet cable and get a high speed connection. The bad news was that they didn't supply any SMTP information, so we couldn't send any email with that connection. That meant logging out (say goodbye to those extra five minutes you already paid for) and using the phone jack to dial in to Earthlink. Of course, the Earthlink number wasn't posted anywhere and my printout was out in the motorhome separated by 50 yards of rain and lightning - oh well, another $3.00 to use the high speed connection again to log in and find the right Earthlink dial up number. Then two tries later we gave up after getting a "no dial tone" error, which we were charged another $3.00 for each time. I wrote down the company's name and number, and this will be a fight when we get back home to get some of that money refunded. Lesson: use cash instead of a credit card (I always thought I'd be logged in for awhile so it wouldn't matter). After that we went to the other truck stop in town, and when I asked the person behind the counter if they had any Internet access she said exactly this, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

We never tried to find a wireless connection anyplace. I dropped my laptop a couple of weeks before the trip and busted my PCMCIA port, but Sarah's worked. However, given the general knowledge we ran into along the road I seriously doubt we would have found anything except in metropolitan downtown areas.

For my next adventure away from daily hotel connections, I'm going to talk to my email hosting company and get an SMTP address from them so that it doesn't matter if we dial in with Earthlink or connect via some other port someplace. They do allow web access to email, but Sarah and I would always do our email offline over the course of a couple of days between connections and then just do a quick send & receive.

It worked out to be about 50/50 on whether a campground would have a modem port and we'd be able to connect successfully.