The Excellent Adventure - Working from Seal Rocks
20-Dec-2010 / 22-Dec-2010
Working at the Lodge
With the weekend of fun over and all our friends heading home, it was time to get to work! The Excellent Adventure is ,after all, a working holiday and we were looking forward to trying out working at the campsite. It wasn’t long before we discovered our first hurdle. Our campsite itself was in a mobile broadband black hole with no signal whatsoever. I did manage to find mobile signal on the beach but while this was ok for calls it wouldn’t be very practical for coding.
Gabe to the rescue! With some sweet-talking and a couple of winks of his magical eye, Gabe managed to convince the owners of Treachery Camp to lend us the use of their “Lodge”. This is a large building on the top of the hill as you enter the camp where they usually house big camping groups. The lodge also provided us with easy access to power and protection from the elements so it turned out to be a pretty good deal!
Here’s what our setup in the lodge looked like:
And here’s my perplexed face which proves that we’re actually working:
Afternoon break
With absolutely no commute time, we managed to get more than 8 hours of work into a day and still have time for enjoying the beautiful venue. Gabe and Cam took some time to pose around like pro surfers:
While I managed to go on a nice beach run. It was about 3.5 kilometers and tough going as running on sand is pretty hard work if you’re not used to it. Here’s some photos I took of the route:
Working from the campsite
On Tuesday, Cam convinced us that we should abandon the niceties of the lodge and actually try and work from the campsite to see how we found it. Once we got the moonchairs into the shade it was actually quite good! I’ll admit it’s a bit strange to be typing on your laptop while listening to cicadas and birdsong, it actually has a strange meditative quality to it. We also copped some curious looks from the other campers in the area but if you were out on a camping holiday and you saw this bunch of weirdos you’d probably stare too…
Ice Cream!!!
I’ve never camped at such a well organised campsite like Seal Rocks before (most of the camping I’ve done in the past involved carrying your tent, bedding and food with you and also packing a shovel for a toilet) so I definitely wasn’t expecting an ice cream truck to visit in the afternoons. Along with all the kids of ages 8 and under we went a little ballistic when we saw it decend the hill into the campsite.
Gabe took on the role of Dad and bought us all ice creams… (thanks Gabe!)
and the pictures tell the rest of the story:
