Day 19 Zero at Fontana Village

Thursday, 28 May 2015

I'm taking an unplanned zero waiting on my mail drop. 

The one drawback of Fontana Village seems to be the slow WiFi and non-existent AT&T and Verizon cellular. I downloaded a speed app and checked the WiFi. Its about 2.75 Mbps down, 0.25 to 0.33 Mbps up, and a latency that ranges from 100-200 ms. So at 0.25 up, it takes 4 sec for 1 Mb or 15 Mb per minute. My average photo is 4.5 MB or 36 Mb. So a photo, ignoring packet latency, ought to upload in about 2 ½ minutes. I use 4 photos per blog, so a blog with upload should take about 10 minutes. That assumes no long system ‘pauses’ that cause a timeout or error. I’ll try one, but I expect the upload to fail. 

As expected a 2-photo blog failed to upload after 7 minutes, with an error. I’ll have to wait for a better signal location. 

I was looking forward to dinner last night, but the clothes were still wet. So I had coffee and chex mix in the room. Kind of a let down. 

But breakfast this morning was great. Moderately priced and perfectly cooked. 

I checked USPS tracking and it didn't show any progress on my box. Being a day late is costing me dollars and time. If it doesn't make it today I’ll probably reprovision at the resort store and leave it. That will make this one expensive zero!

I also asked about a shuttle to the trail in the morning. She said only if it was running and she would check. That’s a rough two extra miles to walk. 

The store is quite a ways down the hill. I don't want to walk it till I find out whether I have to buy food. 

While wasting time I downloaded an app to reduce the size of my photos so I can upload with my blog posts. I was successful in adding them to the last few blogs. I marked those ‘reduced photos’ so I can go back later and replace them with hi-res photos. 

The mail drop didn’t show. The Greenville post office says it was sent for delivery this morning at 0730. That’s a three hour drive. This is Priority Mail due today. Very irritating!!  I waffled about what to do. My schedule was already way behind. With the local post office not opening till 1145 tomorrow, that’s about the soonest I can get the package. But I hate to pay $40 at the local store and leave at 0930 when the package should show up 3 hours later. 

You’ll get the rest of the story tomorrow. Just to include a photo, here’s a shot of part of the room.