Many of us have been working remotely for over three months now. Most of us have implemented several adaptations and new routines for self-care to maintain our mental and physical health during these times. About a month ago, I chronicled my adaptation story which ended with me working from my backyard treehouse. If you missed that article, please go back and read it here, then continue on.

Working from home to working from anywhere

I enjoyed the journey of adding variety to my work from home experience, but I wasn’t quite satisfied. We like to travel as a family, and simply being at home for months on end was starting to make us all a little stir crazy. Additionally, I still had a lot of work to do, so I didn’t feel like I could take much time off yet. (More on that later.)

This thought occurred to me: If I can work from home, then I can work from anywhere. Why am I confining myself to my home address? Where else could I work productively?

The Boundary Waters

The Boundary Waters is a special place for me and many Minnesotans. If you aren’t familiar with the region, it’s somewhat self-described. It’s a protected wilderness area of a bunch of lakes and rivers right on the Minnesota-Ontario border.

For the past 20 years, I’ve headed up there regularly to get away from work. Now, I was pondering going there for work. Can it be done? I decided to try.

The cabin up north

I’m not a native-born Minnesotan, but I married one. For many Minnesota natives, there’s a family cabin “up north” somewhere. I don’t own one myself, but my in-laws do, I am quite fortunate to have access to it.

It’s a 1950’s rustic cabin in the Superior National Forest on Gunflint Lake. The other side of the lake is Canada. It’s about 45 miles from the nearest town, Grand Marais, and about 35 miles beyond the reach of the cell phone towers.

You may be thinking that this sounds like a nice place to escape, but how could I possibly work from there?

Uncle Sam and Fiber-optic internet service

I need to give credit where credit is due. In 2009 our federal government enacted the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to jumpstart the economy after the mortgage meltdown. A part of that act was the Broadband Initiatives Program, which funded internet infrastructure in remote and rural areas. One such recipient was the Arrowhead Cooperative of Cook County, MN. They used the funding to install fiber up to my in-law’s cabin in 2015. I activated the service a few months ago.

I have 100mbps symmetrical (the slowest they offer), which is far better than the DSL service I have in the city. While there is no cell reception, I simply enabled Wi-Fi Calling, which enables my phone to send and receive texts and calls as normal, over Wi-Fi.

With that, I can be completely productive on the far edge of civilization. I love the flexibility of working from anywhere, especially when I have confidence of reliable internet service.

The downsides?

I honestly had some mixed feelings about taking this step. There was definitely some freedom that I experienced in this place being completely unreachable and undistracted by technology for so many years. I didn’t just throw that away without thinking long and hard about it. In the end, I made the choice so I could be flexible and productive while giving myself and my family a change of scenery.

What’s next? It’s time to unplug. Really.

While working from the Boundary Waters on and off over the past month has been great, it’s still been work. I realized that I hadn’t taken any vacation time since January. I had an earlier vacation planned, but we had to cancel it due to COVID-19.

Now, we just made some plans to take an epic trip out to the Pacific Northwest. I’ve written previously about our epic trips. If you missed it, check it out here. So, I’ll be taking some time away from work, and away from this blog to get some needed adventure. I’ll be back to my regular writing routine when I return. See you then.

“The mountains are calling and I must go.” – John Muir

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