Unexpected Digital Holiday (Patreon)

Strange what's in a name.  In Nova Scotia (a Canadian Province), there are two places that, to my uneducated Western Canadian ear, sound a lot alike: Ingonish and Antigonish.   Both have timeshares and Covid left my wife and I with a pair of unused trade weeks banked.  Interval International has a better chance to find you places if you give them lots of choices and lots of weeks to find you a trade.  Since both were in Northern Nova Scotia, I assumed that they were more-or-less equivalent.  It turned out this wasn't the case.

One is a tiny community spread for several kilometres along a bay in Cape Breton.  The other is much larger (a city, in fact).  Ingonish is a lovely tiny community that, like most tourist places, virtually shuts everything down in the off-season.  That's where we ended up trading into.

What can I say?  It was before high season so the restaurants were mostly closed.  The few that were open were fantastic, though.  In Western Canada, it's beef, beef, beef.  We arrived just as the lobster and crab seasons were opening.  We never had so much excellent seafood and at a reasonable price!  I'll create a space for all the pictures my wife and I took for those that are interested.

Of course, there had to be a downside.  We were told that the place had WIFI and that we were connected to the Internet.  Both were true, as far as it went. Used to a 500 Mbps at home, it was a shock to end up on a network connection 2% of that speed.  My wife has a number of devices that continually use the internet because of all the apps she has running.  I ended up with maybe half that.  I thought "Gee, she sleeps in usually.  I'll work in the morning".  Great idea as far as the internet is concerned.

There was no way my desktop was going to fly across country (an 6 hour flight).  Too heavy, too fragile.  I decided my work laptop would do just fine.  I'll load all the apps I need at home and have them available for down times at the other end.  Except: It was ready for greening (i.e. 4 years old) just before Covid hit.  The campus decided to put greening on hold as most profs have better equipment at home than the laptops we used to use to present our lectures.  So there I was, out in Ingonish, on a slow internet connection trying to use the apps I'd loaded.  Photoshop wouldn't even load.  Seems my laptop didn't have a video card it could recognise.  Not too surprising, I guess.  Even Unity seemed to take a dislike to the old beast.  Move a mouse and sometimes it would take several seconds before Unity's internal routines (usually so fast that you don't notice them) would take over the screen.  

So that left hiking ... Seems that most people in Ingonish take down their stairs to the beach for the winter to protect them from winter storms.  It was a real challenge to get down to the beach but more of that when I post the images!