Taking my Notebook on My Vacation

I just returned from a fabulous 4 day vacation up the Sunshine Coast. My wife-like-unit and I car-camped for 3 of the 4 nights and treated ourselves to a motel room in tiny Egmont on the second night. During the booking process (even campsites need to be booked ahead these days), I noticed that many of the places offered internet hook-up, even the tiny motel in Egmont, so I decided to bring along my laptop.

The internet at the Bathgate Motel turned out to be just a dial-up offering, but not to be deterred, I phoned Telus to find out what my local access number from Egmont would be. I was then given a temporary dial-up account (free, as I am already a Telus subscriber), so my dial-up modem was pushed into duty, something I thought I’d never do, because my laptop has all the latest wireless do-dads built in, and I never use anything but high speed these days. After about half an hour of dial-up access at the Bathgate Motel, I very much doubt if my dial-up modem will ever get used again. I don’t remember dial-up being this agonizingly slow back when that was all we had, but going back to it was like torture. I decided that bringing the laptop was a mistake, and stuffed it back into its bag.

But in the end the laptop proved to be quite useful for this holiday. My wife-like-unit has a very expensive digital camera with a massive zoom lens, but alas, a tiny memory card. I am a bit of a shutter bug, and I take pictures of everything. The 64Mb memory card in her camera was soon full, and I berated myself for not having purchased a bigger card for her camera. However, digging around in my laptop case I found that I had brought along my card-reader. So at the end of each day, I emptied the photos from the card onto my laptop and started each day again with a fresh card. The laptop allowed me to edit and purge right away, and another benefit was that during the course of our camping nights we had made some campsite friends, and at night we gave them a slideshow of our photos taken earlier that day. As all these benefits of the laptop became apparent, I came across a fellow camper who had filled up her card and was now stuck with no room to take pictures for the rest of her vacation. I offered to help her out by burning her photos onto a CD (yes, I actually had a few blank CD’s in my laptop case), and her brother-in-law and husband then insisted on keeping us supplied with beer from that moment on. Further proof that Karma works!

The last two nights we spent camping at the Pender Harbour Resort, a funky little campsite with trailer hook-ups, tenting spots, 3 Yurt huts, several cabins and a dock with boat and kayak rentals. Unbelievably, they also had free wireless internet, and the signal reached our little site without any problem. There was a small meeting room building next to our site, and I found within it an extension chord for recharging my trusty little laptop. Right about this time, my MP3 player battery died; no problem, I just plugged it into my laptop as it was charging up, and charged up my MP3 player at the same time.

Now you might be thinking that I spent the entire holiday staring at my computer – quite the contrary. We hiked, swam, explored, biked, paddled, watched a car show, drank copious amounts of beer with some new friends, and smoked a few cigars. And I took a whole bunch of photos. The laptop was just a handy extra, but I will be sure to bring it for my next vacation. See my vacation blog at: http://sunshinecoastholiday.blogspot.com