The Downfall of Camping

We are now one month into this experiment we call a Cross Canada tour, which turned into the Grand North American tour (we are now almost as far east as we can get, and are soon heading south for warmer weather, hitting Florida and then making the turn west to Arizona.  Then we are planning to store the trailer for a few months and head home for Christmas, before returning to Arizona in the spring to pick up where we left off...From California to Alaska.

We have now hit 8 provinces, with one more to go (PEI or Bust), we ticked over the 10,000 km mark on the trip counter and the Flamingo Landing Studio on Wheels has almost 9k on it (and counting).  The trip has led us to seemingly more desolate and remote places the further we have gone.  The later we get in the season the more closed down everything is.  We found a lot of great stops were already closed for the season from the time we left Vancouver (it was still summer then).  Today we had an awesome lunch at a small Bakery / Restaurant on the North Cabot Trail and it was her last day open.  Hopefully the further south we go the less of a problem this will be.  We are running out of campgrounds, we know the US has lots of Walmarts along the Interstates, which will be helpful.

As we have gone along we have been mentally comparing this experience to a car trip and while both have their pros and cons we have both really enjoyed this experience and have always said we like this better than a car trip, where we have to find a hotel every night, some better than others!  We have our own bed, our own fridge full of food, these are all great things.  However we have run into a snag with our data plans.  We were at 90% of our plan 2 weeks ago with the month resetting on Oct 23rd.  I added 3GB, that quickly got used up, I added another 2GBs, which we of course got the dreaded 90% warning 5 days to go.  That meant trying to find wifi...Tim Hortons, Starbucks (non-existent where we are) a wifi zone in town.  Campgrounds don't have wifi in almost all cases.  Finally, we found wifi in the National Park campgrounds in Cape Breton Highlands.  However, our first campground we were to far away to get any usable signal.  Tonight we parked in what we thought was a good spot, only to find the wifi spotty at best.  We then drove around, pinpointing the best coverage, of course spot 67 was already taken.  Spot 35 seemed good, but not usable then we found spot 40 and voila we are in the zone to get slow but usable Internet (thus the blog post).  We rehooked up the trailer and moved to the sweet spot.

I'm now thinking I should remove the TV antenna, which hasn't offered any value (the two times I tried it, no TV) and put a wifi signal booster to help us get signals in the tin can.

Anyway for tonight we have coverage and a fresh set of GBs come Monday!