Wednesday, August 30, 2017

August Already

A previous post for August somehow got over-written when I tried to add in this photo via my Kindle and wifi at the public library, but I will try to reconstruct some of it.

This map appeared outside of my favorite Friday Harbor coffee shop, explaining the wifi trouble I've been having. It appears that much of San Juan Island is composed of large hunks of volcanic rock, which disrupts phone and wifi signals. Early in the spring I was getting unreliable wifi at the house where I'm staying, but by late summer it's mostly non-existent. Sometimes I can't even get a phone signal, but one evening when I went for a walk around the neighborhood, on a hillside a bit south of the house, I connected with Rogers Communications in Canada.

So this makes the island a perfect place for digital detox: no wifi, no phone, no internet, no problems!

Also, no GPS or Strava, if you need that for navigation. But I did read that island emergency services have built a network of transmitters for 911 calls.

We expect the shop to be busy over the Labor Day weekend, but then business should fall off quite a bit and I will be heading home to Ferndale for the winter. I'm actually getting a bit homesick.