Back From Vacation

My wife, son, and I just got back from 3 days in southern Utah at a nice little retreat. It was a wonderful mini vacation with a bunch of friends from the neighborhood. While I enjoy spending time in front of the computer, it is nice to get away and leave electronics behind. I did have my laptop with me, but only used it twice. Both times were to make sure I didn't have any pressing e-mails. In hindsight, I could have left it home.

Someone else planned the entire vacation for me so I just needed to show up. The place we stayed is called the Summit Chateau Lodge and is located near Brian Head ski resort. Naturally I checked out their website before heading down. They didn't mention if they had an Internet connection and so I gave them a call. The owner answered the phone and said that Verizon had data coverage in the area and he had a MiFi device that could allow up to 5 devices to connect to the Internet at the same time. That was all I needed as I didn't plan on doing much work.

As we prepared to leave on the trip, I needed to figure out what car to take. I prefer to do long drives in my sedan, but it is low to the ground and not very good on dirt roads. I plugged in "Summit Chateau Lodge" into maps.google.com and selected satellite view to see that it was a 3 to 4 mile dirt road leading to the resort. That meant my car was out of the question. As it was only 3 to 4 miles of dirt road, I opted for my wife's Subaru instead of the Jeep. While the Jeep would have been fun, the 200 miles of pavement getting to the dirt would have been less than comfortable. Besides, the Subaru Outback Sport gets much better gas mileage. Now that I am back I can say that the Subaru was the best choice. We had fun playing rally-car driver on the dirt road and my sedan would have had a difficult time making it up several steep sections without bottoming out.

Sure I could have gone on vacation without the Internet. Some of my fellow neighbors did. However it sure helped to go down prepared.