We did it! It wasn't easy but we did it. After staying up until the wee hours of Sunday morning to get this web site up, we treated ourselves to two hours of sleep and then dragged our weary carcasses out of the sack to finish off the minor tasks standing between us and the open road.
Happily, these minor tasks included phone calls to our friends to let them know that we we had become engaged. Unhappily, they also included scrubbing out Otto's refrigerator, which had become a bit fragrant since we left an open jar of mayonnaise in there a couple weeks back. Mmmmm....rotting mayonnaise.
By 2:00 in the afternoon, things we're looking pretty good. Our gear was all stowed in the van, we'd attached our ultrahep "Extreme Telecommuting" license plate frames, and I'd transferred all the software we'd need off our desktop computer on to the laptop that would be our workhorse for the Odyssey. It was time. Time to cut the talk and start driving. Time to finally grab hold of destiny's diaphanous tail and let her spin us out like gossamer to the winds. It was also time for a final bathroom break. And then, just like that, we were off. Our good friend, Tanya Saine, took that picture you see on the top of this page of us leaving. You can send her your comments on the photo's composition, if you like.
We were pretty darn pumped to finally hit the road after the couple months we had been
talking about doing this trip. High fives we're everywhere as we pulled on to I-5
and I'm pretty sure Kristanne even did a little spontaneous break dancing as
we passed the Tacoma city limits, heading north to Seattle. She's old school, you know.
We had a couple stops to make in Seattle before we could head east. First up was the place that sold us Otto. Otto came to us used without a manual. For two months, we had been pestering the dealer to get us the manuals so we could know how to perform some of the more obscure tasks associated with owning an RV-style vehicle (like where the heck is the valve for draining the fresh water tank?). I'd managed to photocopy a manual from a 97 Eurovan, but there were a few crucial differences between the 97 and the 95 (Otto) that were starting to become minor irritants. But like the sand in the oyster that becomes a pearl, these irritants only served to steel our vigilance. We beat on, boats against the current, until finally our efforts were rewarded. After two months of hounding, Otto's actual manuals (right down to the serial numbers) were waiting for us at the dealer. Ahhh...sweet success.
By the way, I promise never to use that "sand in the oyster" simile again. You can come back now. It's safe.
Since we were getting such a late start, we decided to just drive the two hours or so to Leavenworth, Washington, and camp on the Icicle River. You can see Kristanne there at our campsite, leaning against Otto's awning. Flush with the excitement of the first night of our Office Odyssey, we decided to get right to cracking on our first dispatch to the website from the road. We fired up the laptop, started to open the local copy of our website, and...oh, no. Great scott. Holy fiddlesticks. Yours truly, "Steel Trap" Sid had forgotten to make a copy of our website source files on the laptop. We we're flying blind.
But did we panic? You bet we did. A whole bunch. But after a couple minutes
of heavy sweating, we remembered that we could just FTP the whole site back
down to our laptop from the server. All we needed was the
Acoustic Koupler.
After an abortive attempt to get connected to our server from the payphone at our campsite, we decided to try some hotels in town that might have better phones. See, payphones mostly have shoddy carbon microphones that limit connection speeds using the Koupler to about 2400bps. With a full-on condenser microphone like we might find in a hotel lobby, it was possible that we could get almost 14.4 connection speeds. So, we went Extreme. We commenced to hooking up the laptop and Koupler to phones in hotel lobbies from one end of Leavenworth to another. But something was wrong. The modem would dial out, but it just wouldn't connect to the server. I kept getting kicked off. Stupid Koupler. Stupid trip. Stupid van. Moods were beginning to turn sour.
Thankfully, the everloving Kristanne got me to consider our predicament a bit more calmly. As it turned out, I had neglected to specify the IP address for the DNS of the server to which I was connecting. Yeah, I know -- everybody forgets their DNS IP address from time to time, but this really steamed my drawers, you know? So anyway, after adding the appropriate info, we hauled Otto off to a bus stop on the side of Leavenworth's main road and connected up to a payphone with the Koupler. Would it work now? Would salvation be near?
It was. We managed to get connection and proceeded to have a nice 30 minute FTP session at 2400bps. Got the whole site back and everything. Now, if only we're able to send this file back today! You'll know we did if you're reading it
Check back tomorrow as we hit the road north to Banff! See you then!