Internet outage – flying blind

In the morning I feel strong and powerful. I sit down at my laptop at 7 a.m. and write about the past day’s experiences. As so often, it takes longer than planned – it’s already 2 p.m. I feel stressed because I can’t keep my notes as I wanted to. “If we also want to document our trip on video and publish a movie on YouTube once a week, I don’t think I can continue to write as extensively as I have in recent years,” I say thoughtfully. “Then just write shorter,” replies Tanja. “You know very well that it’s not my thing. Either I write the whole story or not at all,” I reply thoughtfully and sadly, because up to now I’ve always enjoyed documenting our experiences in book form. “

Not writing at all is not a good decision,” says Tanja. “But if I have to record our experiences in just a few sentences, it doesn’t do justice to the trip or to us,” I argue. “You can still write down your short daily notes and if you want to publish a book later on, you can use these stories. That way the material is not lost. I think we should try out on this trip whether it makes sense for us to record our experiences in videos. Who knows, you might really enjoy this creative work,” Tanja suggests. “Hm, maybe you’re right and it’s time to change old habits. It’s not easy for me, but I’ll give it some serious thought in the coming weeks,” I reply.

Although we had planned to leave for France in the morning, it was already 2:30 pm. I insert the ignition key into the Terra Love’s ignition lock, turn it to the right and the diesel engine comes to life with a low hum.

Because we have used up 50 GB of data in just a few days, after just a few kilometers we visit one of the fast food restaurants, where there is usually free Wi-Fi, to upload a video for tomorrow. “There’s an MC!” shouts Tanja. We steer our expedition vehicle into the parking lot and stand in front of a tow truck. The restaurant is just as we know it. Some of the tables are covered in leftover food. We search for a power socket for the laptop, unfortunately without success. As far as possible, we make ourselves comfortable at one of the tables and set up the Wi-Fi. “It worked,” I say happily. I quickly open YouTube to upload a 17 GB video in 4K quality to our channel. “It doesn’t work,” I say disappointedly after several unsuccessful attempts. “The management has probably blocked the upload of large files,” says Tanja.” We pack everything up again and decide to leave the country road and continue on the highway towards Bilbao despite the high tolls. Before we leave the parking lot, we set up the navigation system again. “No internet access,” I say, startled. “How can that be?” asks Tanja, “Must have something to do with the settings on your cell phone. We’ve probably had no network since we crossed the border between Germany and France a few kilometers ago,” I reply, pondering.

We stop next to the highway at a snow-covered turning loop to check whether we can change the settings. “No chance,” I say, annoyed. Without further ado, we call our internet provider in Germany. It takes a while before we reach someone on Saturday afternoon. We finally get through to someone who takes our problem on board but can’t help us any further. After waiting 20 minutes for a call back, I call again. The same result. “I’ll transfer you to support,” we hear. After another half hour, we get someone on the line who tells us that we can only expect help on Monday, as the support team is not working at the weekend. “What now?” asks Tanja, “No idea. Our navigation systems are no longer working, so we’re flying blind here. Damn the technology. If we had a road map like we used to, we could navigate manually and drive on, but in this modern age without a network, we’re disoriented.” We decide to spend the night here next to the highway and drive back to the MC tomorrow. There we can use the lousy Wi-Fi to download and install the route to Bilbao. We can then continue our journey until we can set up our cell phones correctly on Monday with the help of support.”…

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