I’m working remotely. Really, really remotely. First thing this morning, I bicycle to the Park Ranger’s office with my laptop and a bottle of water stowed in my backpack like a fifth-grader sneaking supplies to his friends in the woods. Time to to mooch off the park’s free WiFi for a spell. I brought water with me, but I feel the need to pay the WiFi piper by purchasing a bottle of overpriced Dasani from the lonely Park Trading Post employee. I plant myself on a wood rocker in an insect-infested outdoor porch with two lazy ceiling fans crookedly turning above me, cringing every time a colossal swamp bug of unknown origin does a fly-by. I download, I upload, I yank various client files off their blasted Google Drives, and when my laptop starts to literally burn my lap and the tree frogs overwhelm me with their high-pitched heat warnings in the still-as-stone scrub all around me, I climb back on my bike and pedal back to the RV, the air conditioning, and my two waiting kitties. As is often the case with things, I need access to WiFi two hours later, so I drive into town to mooch more internet. It’s 95 degrees with a heat index of 103. I cannot take the A/C-less, buggy porch outside the Ranger’s office again today.
Nineteen miles of Florida scrub, a single-lane 45-mph pockmarked road offering one slowly passing truck, and I finally pull into a BP gas station straight out of 1986. Yes, they have free WiFi, and yes, there’s a table I can sit at in the “Cafe.” I sit, my table adjacent to a salty old gentleman flirting robustly with a gas station employee, chattering and tittering at their inside jokes. I buy some water and Chex Mix, finish my work, and gas up my tank. Drive back to the campground—with a quick detour to sit on the side of the road to check my iPhone Emails before the Verizon signal melts away from four bars to zero with each passing mile, and stare around me at a depressing expanse of felled pine trees and full logging trucks. Welcome to nature: see it get raped by man before your very eyes.
Back at Junebug, I crank up my iTunes—since Pandora is taking the afternoon off, along with cell signal—and am greeted with an off-season Andrea Bocelli holiday tune cycling through my antiquated music library while I count the hours until I can go to bed and be one day closer to leaving this remote swamp. No. I switch the music to Kenny Chesney’s Songs for the Saints album—something that carried me through the devastating loss of a beloved pet as I drove aimlessly for hours one sad day last October—and I feel revived. I can do this. I am doing this.
TravelswithJunebug 