![\"No](\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/no-WiFi-symbol.png\" "\\"no")
As you probably know by now, this past week Steve and I went on a big adventure to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. It was a glorious trip that we’d been planning to do for literally decades with our friends Diane and Bill.<\/p>\nAs you probably know by now, this past week Steve and I went on a big adventure to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. It was a glorious trip that we’d been planning to do for literally decades with our friends Diane and Bill.<\/p>\n
There was one thing for which I was unprepared, and that’s that we would have nearly zero Internet on the trip. We traveled 750 miles in 7 days, and for about 80% of that we had no cell service at all on AT&T. Diane and Bill have Verizon and it was much better, but still around 50% of the time they had nothing. Oddly sometimes we’d see four or five dots of cell service, but they’d be hollow instead of filled, and the signal would say 4G. What do empty dots mean anyway? I can tell you they don’t mean you can post to Facebook, that’s for sure.<\/p>\n
Our hotel claimed that it would have WiFi in the common areas, but they were just lying about that on their website. There was no WiFi at all.I found it ironic that we had so little access on this trip, when we had really good cell service while in Peru! Heck, when we hiked the 6 miles up to the ancient Incan city of Machu Picchu, we had great cell service! Steve did post a photo while on the top of that mountain. Odd that in the United States we couldn’t get a tweet out to save our souls.<\/p>\n
While it was really frustrating when we saw a Grizzly Bear momma and her two cubs and get crazy good photos of them and not to be able to show them to anyone but each other, there were odd things that we couldn’t do that were pretty interesting. Let’s talk about what you can’t do without Internet when you live in the Apple world.<\/p>\n
![\"Apple](\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/apple-music-logo.png\" "\\"apple-music-logo.png\\""){kind=logo}
Apple Music<\/strong> – You know that I don’t listen to music under normal circumstances, but it would have been great on a trip like this. The four of us have iPhones and all of us have access to Apple Music. The SUV we rented (a GMC Acadia) had Car Play. We were super excited to give it a try. I plugged my phone in, and I only had one album that was downloaded from the cloud (West Coast Cool). They liked the album but 30 minutes later we were done with my phone. I could have sworn that I downloaded some songs locally, more than the one album, but evidence suggested I was wrong. I plugged in Steve’s, and oddly he only had a half dozen songs locally too. Confused, we plugged in Diane’s phone. Diane had done a lot of work on Apple Music to ensure she had downloaded many many songs from the cloud to local storage, but none of the songs were there. Bill doesn’t use Apple Music normally, but evidently he and connected at some point to the shared account he has with Diane, because all of his music was gone from local storage too. Now you could assume I’m an idiot and didn’t do my<\/em> music correctly, but how could Diane, Bill and Steve all done it wrong too? I would suggest that four grown up people with seven engineering degrees between them not getting Apple Music to work is a truly bad interface.<\/li>\n![\"Big](\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/big_bison.png\" "\\"big_bison.png\\"")
Access to Information<\/strong> – Without an Internet connection, how do you find out whether the beasts you’re seeing in Yellowstone are buffalo or bison? (We figured out they’re bison when we got Internets but I had to rename a LOT of photos). We saw a giant herd of bison and oddly it appeared that they were all boys, even the ones shepherding the calves. Then Diane thought, what if girl bison have horns? We had no way to look that up.<\/p>\n It reminds me of when Dr. and Mrs. Garry went with us to King’s Canyon and we had no Internet. We played a game all week that we called “Making Stuff Up”. In the normal world if you say something totally wrong or ridiculous, someone can look it up and challenge you. But when you have no Internets, you can make up anything you want, no matter how absurd and no one can prove you wrong. We played a lot of Making Stuff Up in King’s Canyon.<\/p>\n There’s also critical access to information. Because they got 600 inches of snow in Grand Teton this year and because they’re having an early summer, they’re starting to have flooding in the valley. It didn’t affect us but as we were leaving there were roads about to be washed out and campgrounds closed as a result. We also smelled a fire one night in Yellowstone, and we had no way of finding out if it was something minor that had been dealt with or the start of some giant forest fire. Steve saw the sky turning very red at sunset while he was out, and the hotel staff didn’t seem to be sure what was going on. Would have been swell to have access to park information.<\/li>\n After that litany of things we couldn’t do because we didn’t have Internet, there’s one upside. We couldn’t follow politics for almost a week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As you probably know by now, this past week Steve and I went on a big adventure to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks. It was a glorious trip that we’d been planning to do for literally decades with our friends Diane and Bill. There was one thing for which I was unprepared, and that’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11974,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[1748,1749,1548,396,774,1747,1115],"class_list":["post-11975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts","tag-apple-music","tag-car-play","tag-cellular","tag-data","tag-internet","tag-national-parks","tag-siri"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/no-WiFi-symbol.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11975"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11997,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11975\/revisions\/11997"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11974"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}