The hard part isn't the wifi - it's managing yourself.
The hardest part of working from the road isn't the wifi or the gear. It's getting up and actually starting the workday when nobody's making you. You're managing yourself out here - you're the only one holding yourself accountable, and that's the real skill. Everything below is how I make it possible.
The first thing I set up anywhere is a desk I've had longer than almost anything else out here. I bought it in Tampa, when it was my desk at my partner's place, before we lived together. It became my full-time desk for our year in Vegas. After that it went in the car and never came back out. It folds flat and rides as the bottom layer in the back of Daisy, and it comes out wherever we land - living rooms, porches, outside.
Try the house wifi first - that's the rule. The Starlink Mini comes out when the house wifi is bad across the board, or when it can't hold both of us online at once. One house taught us why the fallback matters: the wifi was bad and there was nowhere to set up the Starlink, so we scraped through the workweek. We'd asked about the wifi beforehand and gotten a good answer that didn't survive contact. Now we vet for a real backup - clear sky, somewhere to put the dish - so a disappointing wifi week doesn't turn into a lost one.
In the car, everything runs off a Bluetti battery. It plugs into the car and charges while we drive, and the Starlink runs off it - so we're online while we're moving, and still online parked with the engine off. We've never run out or come close. In a house it's a plug problem: I set up on tables and couches, and the outlet is never where I'm sitting, so there's always an extension cord snaked across the room to wherever I've landed.
We both work off external monitors - my partner's eyeing a second, and I'm rethinking mine; none of it's settled, which feels about right. We learned to move them the hard way - we checked them in a bag on one of our rare flights and one came out with a cracked screen. Never again. Now they ride in my work bag, which I treat like a purse: small, not much in it, always within reach, packed with care. The careful packing is the whole lesson.
We work out of the house most days. I give my partner whatever the realest desk is - or the best seat at the table when that's all there is - and make do from the spot next to it. What makes a sit actually workable comes down to a few things: good wifi, or clear open sky for the Starlink; enough room to take calls without being on top of each other, so our meetings don't bleed into one another; and pets who stay calm through work hours.
Time zones are their own puzzle. Right now we're on Mountain time, my work runs on Pacific, and we keep Eastern hours - three-way translation, all day long. That daily math is exactly why I built Waypoint, a free tool for scheduling calls across time zones so you're not doing it in your head every time.
That's what's working right now. When it stops working, or something better turns up, that goes out on Substack. Nothing else does.
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