First time visitors to the Gunflint Trail often arrive with a cell phone in hand. One of their first questions is "don't you have cell phone coverage?" quickly followed by "How can you live without a cell phone?" Believe us when we say that a much more difficult problem is keeping our computer updated while living nearly "off the grid".

We returned home after an abbreviated Christmas trip to discover that our computer had picked up some unwanted guests. After 5 hours of downloading support programs we discovered that our current Internet security system was not current. Another 3 hours of computer downloading and we finally reached a 115 MB security program update that promised to evict our unwanted guests. We started the program and discovered that it would only take another 23 hours to complete the download. Living with Internet delivered computer program updates and dial-up service is not something we recommend!

Wednesday we unplugged our computer and took it to town where the local computer guru has high speed Internet access. Of course it snowed all day and again today when we went back to town to retrieve our computer. We got to enjoy driving through a winter postcard that is the Gunflint Trail.

I suspect getting our computer fixed after 3 hours of driving time and a day spent without a computer was still faster that what would have happened if we continued to update it using dial-up.