On the Road…Almost

Well, I’m on-line.  And I’m in Australia.  These two facts, put together, constitute a small miracle.

It has been a helluva week, lemme tell you.  The flight(s) to Australia…don’t get me started.  Whoever invented long haul flights must have been been related to Torquemada.  It took 24 hours to decompress after we arrived.  The first 12 hours you think you’re just fine.  Then the impact catches up with you, slams into you and dumps you on the ground bleeding and gasping for breath.  I wiped out like a beached fish.  I could barely string sentences together. Oh man…!

Once I was coherent again, I innocently tried to find the nearest public WiFi network to check email and see if my kids had burned down our house or remembered to feed the cats yet…

And so began a saga that ended with us shelling out for an expensive stick modem that will give me satellite broadband Internet access anywhere in the state of Western Australia for the entire month — prepaid of course.  It turns out that there are no public networks in the small town where my parents live.  And no (sob!) Starbucks!  There wasn’t any Internet cafes, either.  The nearest Internet cafe was in Perth, the state’s capital city, an hour’s train ride away…

As we are about to head off in a van that is Australia’s version of a Winnebago, touring the state for 20 days, schlepping back to Perth to check email each day is out of the question.

So, a stick modem and satellite access it is.  Damn, what a pain, huh?  Access wherever I go.  What a bitch.  🙂

And here was I thinking I would have been suffering DT’s by the end of the month, using public networks….

Tomorrow we pick up the van, pack it, and Tuesday we head out on the road.  Somewhere in there, I should probably get some writing done.