Throughout the trip, but specifically in Prague on Thursday, 27-June


To date, I’ve only had two issues come up where I didn’t have a backup plan in hand.


The first was in Greenland – Data transfer for my Drone. I’d assumed that I could just connect my drone to my Laptop via the USB-C to USB-C cable… but unfortunately that didn’t work out. I spent an hour or so trying to troubleshoot it, finally finding out that (as weird as this is) my cable was too high quality.

Yep – the drone was designed for simple power-only cables, and got overwhelmed when I connected a high-speed power-and-date cable. In the end, I had to buy a new adaptor for the laptop so I could connect the physical memory card. It worked, but cost me a few bucks.

The second was a bit more impactful, and quite a bit more anxiety-inducing. My cell phone. Now, keep in mind that I have backups for the phone. If it died, I brought my old phone along for the ride… and if that died, I’ve got my laptop available. No, this was for something less physical… I hadn’t planned contingencies for my cell provider dying.

Granted – I did have some backups for this. I had wifi, and I still had both the backup phone and laptop available. All of which got used to troubleshoot, and isolate that it was in fact my provider that was borked, and not the phone itself… Especially since I’d tried calling their tech support line, and they did everything in their power to avoid admitting that this was a network-wide issue.

Thankfully, I was able to set up a backup system on the fly. I found out (thanks to Reddit, mainly) that most US Cell providers were having a major outage throughout the world, specifically due to a “third party vendor”, and not “an attempt to reduce overhead immediate before the end of the quarter”. I hopped online, and got some insight from some of my European friends, and was able to install an e-SIM into my phone – thankfully, my primary phone was new enough that it could support an embedded SIM card.

That didn’t get me voice or text, of course, but it was enough to get data – and data was enough for me to stay safely connected and navigate through the city.

This one was a much bigger impact (and danger) than the drone, if that wasn’t super clear. I lost connectivity while out and about, but thankfully had been around the city for a few days at that point and was able to navigate my way back to the apartment (and wifi) by memory. My phone did have location tracking still available, but when the network first went down it lost the ability to navigate… so if I hadn’t remembered to bookmark the apartment, I could have been in a world of trouble.


In the end, lessons learned. Safely, to boot, which I’m endlessly thankful for. I’m writing this from an apartment up in Switzerland, lessons taken to heart, though definitely curious what other challenges still await me…