Prius Hilton #14: Road Trip & Working Remotely
Pacific Northwest
Back in September, I took a trip up to Seattle for a friend’s birthday; but instead of just flying out for a weekend, I decided to turn it into a 12-day road trip. I’ve been to most of the major spots in the Pacific Northwest independently before, but I had always wanted to do a single, continuous road trip, so this gave me a reason to finally do it.
My other goal for this trip was to see how effectively I could work remotely while traveling in my car. For some context, I’ve now qualified for a 6-week sabbatical from work, and a possibility I’ve been considering was to use it to do a cross-country road trip. However, a thought which has crossed my mind was to just work remotely during my road trip, which would allow me to use my sabbatical for something else. This Seattle road trip would serve as a way to help measure the feasibility of the non-sabbatical cross-country road trip.
Planning
I suspected that the main risk around being able to effectively work remotely while traveling was the distracting mental burden of constantly solving basic logistical issues; things like where to work, shower, sleep, etc. To try to mitigate this, I came up with a rough travel plan so that, as much as possible, I could simply just be following a schedule. As an aside, I was surprised that, after trying several travel-specific apps, I felt like none of them provided enough value to justify having “yet another app”, so I just customized my default app to suit my needs (full disclosure: I work at this company so take with a grain of salt).
Day 1: Thursday
After work on Thursday, I prepped a few days worth of food, mainly sandwiches and omelettes (details in past posts). Then, I started my drive so I could get out of San Francisco while there wasn’t any traffic. I made it to Vacaville and got a good night’s sleep at a Walmart.
Day 2: Friday
Taking the day off, I drove up to Lassen National Park, and hiked the Cinder Cone trail. I enjoyed being outdoors, but objectively, the trail wasn’t particularly amazing.
Afterwards, I headed to Castle Crags State Park and got a campsite, and was confronted with the first surprise of the trip. The park attendant told me I should put my ice cooler in the designated, bear-proof locker. If you’ve read my blog, you’ll remember that my ice cooler doubles as support for my mattress. Without it, the head of my mattress will just sag down into the area behind the passenger seat. After some contemplation, I ended up just leaving it in my car which turned out to be fine. That said, if I do more car camping, I’ll come up with a better solution to remove my dependency on my ice cooler.
Day 3: Saturday
I got an early start on Saturday and hiked the Castle Crags Dome trail. All things considered, it was very enjoyable — would recommend.
The original plan was to spend the night in Crater Lake National Park, but given how busy work was, I decided to head straight to Portland. The goal was to have a relaxing Sunday and ensure that I get enough sleep to set myself up for a good, productive start to the work week.
Day 4: Sunday
By Sunday, I had run out of the food I had prepared beforehand and my schedule called for me to do another round of meal prep. At this point, I finally accepted that it wasn’t worth spending a not-insignificant amount of my limited time to save a relatively small amount of money. I don’t regret eating out for the rest of the trip, though I do wish I would have generally chosen healthier options.
Day 5: Monday
This was the true test — seeing if I could get a solid day’s worth of work done. Since I was willing to trade dollars for convenience to a certain extent, I figured I could pay per-day at a coworking office space. However, when I arrived, I learned that they didn’t offer daily rates; they had monthly memberships. One of the coworking spaces I had previously passed by in the bay area offered daily rates, which led me to wrongly assume that it was a common thing.
Following my backup plan, I drove to a library which advertised free, reservable study rooms. Unfortunately, the rooms were more popular than I anticipated and they had all been booked days before.
This posed a problem, mainly because I had to attend / run several meetings over the next couple of days. As a last resort, I went back to my car for these meetings, which was less than ideal since I had to tether my laptop to my phone to get internet connection. Having to call in via phone instead of being present via webcam wasn’t a huge pain; the main issue was that I couldn’t stream the shared screen and so there was constant communication friction around making sure I was looking at the same things as the rest of the team.
In addition to meetings with team members, I also had to conduct several phone interviews. While these went smoothly, I felt particularly powerless inside my car, given that something like a car alarm going off nearby would be clearly heard by the candidate and would be quite unprofessional.
Days 6–11
Other than live meetings, I felt like I was comfortably productive working on individual tasks at cafes and coffee shops. Of course, I would be working the whole day and wouldn’t have the time or energy to do any exploring during the work week.
On Friday, I drove from Portland to Seattle and spent the weekend there. Then, on Monday, I did the 14 or so hour drive back home to San Francisco.
Lessons Learned
- Having a schedule laid out beforehand was helpful, but there’s only so much prep you can do. It’s difficult to predict ahead of time which neighborhoods will be ideal for sleeping; this is mainly around how safe it feels, and how slanted the streets are.
- I should consider adding support for my mattress separately from my ice cooler if I go camping in the future.
- Meal prepping is especially not worth my time while traveling. I continue to have a difficult time picking healthy food options when given the choice.
- Without being able to find a better way to participate in meetings, the “working while road tripping” plan is not realistic.
- If traveling, be pessimistic about the value of being remote during the work week; only expect to explore and have fun on the weekends.
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