Written by Mia:

We have clearly become addicted to and dependent on our smart phones and their promise of constant connected-ness. It was vaguely clear to me before we left especially given the data roaming decisions we made when we were travelling but still based in Oslo.

I would like to apologise to everyone I owe more communication to and I wanted to paint a picture for you, not really to complain and I hope it doesn’t come across that way, but to explain… there is too much, so I will sum up our communication situation.

Sketchy internet – we have good internet, well at least occasionally but very rarely when we need it…

Jon has spent many a frustrating hours researching internet solutions and trying to get the solution he decided on to actually be set up correctly and work. The easiest one and the one he would have preferred to have is very expensive, and well outside the budget of a family without an income…Then, every time we move locations (even from a marina in one location to an anchorage in the same place) we have to go and find passwords for networks to borrow etc.

Usually, we do a little internet dance and hope we can reach people on birthdays and anniversaries and things! It works about half the time.

Internet is great, it is maybe even as important as food, water and shelter. We use it for weather forecasting (very important for us), for researching boat maintenance and of course for we really want to communicate more. For example, post more to the blog and share our experiences, but it takes an hour or so to just upload a post and we often have to make multiple attempts as it often fails when the internet connection is broken. So, it should suffice to say we have a lot more to share and hopefully will more and more as we get the hang of things.

New email address

Just trying to keep up wth family and friends is challenging. I changed my email address right before we left (NEVER NEVER use your work address as your main email, even if you work in the the same place for more than 10 years… enough said on that subject) and I have about 50 email to write, including answering people who have sent really lovely messages and at least two friends that would like to visit us… the problem is that I never have the golden combination of strong internet and time to write at the same time, so I just keep feeling guilty.

FB and messenger and LinkedIn

I have spent less and less time on FB over the last few years, but since I have a new email address I have this suspicious feeling that people might be trying to reach me there, but I wouldn’t know for sure because I don’t have FB messenger. This sounds lame I know! But unfortunately there is a little problem, I never have enough internet to download it so it times out halfway through and when this has happened a few times, I lose interest and do something else.

Oh yeah and one of the things on my lists of things to do before leaving Oslo was to get my CV and LinkedIn up to date… I am not ignoring your requests, I just haven’t even been there yet.

Phone access

So, on the plane down there at the beginning of March we said, we will just pick up a pay-as-you-go SIM card so that we can reach people in Spain. Jon picked one up on one of our errand trips in Palma and then it laid around for a month or so as we decided which phone we were going to use it with. In the end we decided we needed to leave  both Norwegian numbers and mobiles as they are… The solution is to pick up a cheap call and SMS phone for the SIM card but then that wouldn’t work because everyone uses WhatsApp here and the phone we had in mind doesn’t support that. The decision making process grinds to a halt… again.

Anyway, we have managed in the end! We have a boat phone and the Spanish number is (drumroll please) +34 603 30 70 50 and it is ironically like a land line, but on the boat. We never take it off Itchy Foot. Please call us if you like, we would love to hear from you all. It’s free for us to receive calls on this phone so please use it if you fancy calling to say hi and chat – we’d welcome the call!

I am really sorry for not being better at communicating! I hope this post does its part to explain the situation a little bit.