Work From Anywhere Blog: Week 7; Vacation while traveling and Verizon coverage map failure

Last week was an interesting one because it was my first of two vacation weeks while we’ve been on the road. We also got very lucky with the timing of this first week because we were staying on Lake Powell, in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and we barely had any cell service - which would have completely prevented me from working. This week I’m chatting through how we handled both.

Family pic on Lake Powell in the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area

First and foremost, it was SO NICE to be off of work for the entire week. Since I’ve been working on an east coast schedule, while on the west coast, this usually meant getting up around 5 AM and working in the dark for a couple of hours. I never thought it would actually be nice to be woken up by a toddler again. It was also so much less stressful because Kailah and I didn’t have to work around my meeting schedule (not to mention that I could help Kailah with the girls). Normally, we would discuss my schedule and which meetings I couldn’t afford to have background noise during. She would then take the girls outside, or put on a movie in the back of the RV. Last week we didn’t have to worry about any of that!

Stroller ride before sunset over Lake Powell

The other half of “vacation” on the road is purely psychological. I put the word vacation in quotes because I don’t really like using the word. Mostly because of the traditional connotation it carries with it being “something we do to go somewhere and spend time away from home” - usually to disconnect from the day-to-day and let loose. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this and science shows it is beneficial for all of us, but for Kailah and I, I don’t think it accurately describes what we are trying to accomplish long term. With technology being what it is, we want to free our time and not be limited by the handful of weeks each year that we are allowed to be somewhere other than home. So, when we take time away from work (notice I didn’t use the V word) we try and plan action packed adventures, in our bucket list locations, so that we can experience as much as possible.

That’s where the psychology of this whole cross country RV adventure comes in. Aren’t we already doing that AND working? Whether its my “day job” during the day, or NOE work at night, Kailah and I are VERY busy on the road. We have so much to do on a daily basis, it was very tempting last week to just back fill my additional time with more “stuff”. It took until Monday afternoon, or Tuesday for us to say “STOP”. It was time to literally not work, not plan, not do anything, but enjoy spending time with each other and the girls in the beautiful Glen Canyon NRA.

Lake Powell Resorts and Marinas - Driftwood Lounge (Click on the photo for a direct link to the “Travel Like its 2019” shirts!)

To tie all of this back to WFA…last week we dodged a huge bullet in the form of cell reception. I had originally planned to work from Lake Powell for the entire week, with my previous employer. As fate would have it, I switched jobs and took these two weeks off in between. Not only was the Wi-Fi extremely slow, the cell reception was almost nonexistent. Both of them were around 1.5 mbps download speed, which would not have worked for any video calls and probably wouldn’t have provided enough bandwidth to hold reliable audio calls. Say nothing about managing data and reporting processes virtually (this is the first time that the Verizon coverage map and Outly cross reference has failed us). It would have either been a train wreck of a week, or we would have had to leave our best RV site yet (pictured below). The WFA gods were with us…