Be Prepared

/ Outdoor Gear / , ,

I went to the bar at Pine Lake to night and at about 9.30pm there was a power cut. No power anywhere onsite. Fortunately between the emergency lights and candles the bar stayed open, they did not need electricity to serve to beer and they improvised a till.

I headed back to my lodge at about 11pm in darkness, one enterprising “camper” had parked his car outside the patio window of their unit and was using the headlights to light the room. When I got back, used the led light on my key ring to light my way to my backpack where I had my Petzl headlamp – I also unpacked my led hand light from my possibles pouch and I have that clipped to the uplighter in the living room with a small caribiner.

the next thing was a hot drink – there is a steel tray in the kitchhen so I turned that upside down and put that on one of my tea towels to provide protection for the work top and used my meths stove and crusader mug and lid to brew some fresh coffee.

There is also something wrong with the water pressure so I filled all three of my water bottles and the kettle just in case,

Another problem was I had spent the evening editing the address book on my iPhone and a few minutes ago I got the 10% power warning so I am now charging/powering the phone from the emergency power pack.

Be Prepared!

The photo is the bar by candle light.

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Pine Lake Resort Internet – Final Word

/ Travel, Walking / , , ,

I went to the reception this morning to ask what was going to happen. To be fair the receptionist did not know, I didn’t think she would, but I needed her to pass my problem on. Helpfully she said she would pass my problem on to her manager, unhelpfully she informed me that Pine Lake could not authorise a refund!

So after a day walking along the coast – see photo below taken from the promenade at Morecambe – I went back to reception where there was some news. The site maintenance could not fix the issue, neither can Swisscom, so no Internet. I did however get my money back.

Moral – I am sure the high speed internet works here, but think twice before buying it could use up some of your holiday sorting it out.

It is a shame I did not pack one of my engineers and his laptop, spares and toolbox – I just have the feeling we could have sorted at least a patch to get the customer online.

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Pine Lake Resort Internet – Update Day 3

/ Business / , ,

I got a call from another Swisscom tech support engineer today at about 2.30pm – who said he could not log into the device in my unit, so would be passing it back to Pine Lake onsite staff who would replace the unit. (I now wonder why this onsite team could not have visited me on Monday and swapped the device anyway – at least I would have been happy.)

Needless to say I did not get a visit today – now fed up wit this I am going to ask for a refund tomorrow and tell them to forget it.

Saturday evening – paid my money but no internet – I bought 7 days although that is really 6 days in the unit
Sunday – no high speed internet – 5 days left
Monday – no high speed internet – 4 days left

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Pine Lake Resort Internet – Update

/ General /

I waited for the Swisscom tech support to call me back and in the end at about 2pm (after I got nack from a walk) I called them for an update.

Again I got a very polite member of staff who looked up my case on their system, yes it had been escalated to the second line support team, but as of then they had not taken any action on the matter. It was explained to me that they were probably dealing with a higher priority matter. He resubmitted my call so it was again at the top of the call list.

So here I am waiting again – no internet. ICorrect me if I am wrong but I am pretty certain that someone here has made a profit from selling me this service.

Let’s keep a list of days without internet – but paid for.

Saturday evening – paid my money but no internet
Sunday – no high speed internet

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Pine Lakes Internet

/ Business / ,

I went to the reception to report the issues with the sooo slooooow internet and got the expected “here is the Swisscom tech support number call them response”.

However the call is free when made from the phone in my unit – so I called them, and spoke to tech support who listened to the problem. I explained what I did for a living, he skipped any “play book” questioned, checked my IP and DNS with me. Ran some quick tests from his end and with in five minutes had escallated the call to the next level, with a promise of a call back to me later today.

Very good service – let’s see where this goes now.

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Lunch Break

/ Outdoor Gear, Travel, Walking / , , ,

I went for a walk in the outlying limestone area south of the Lake District today. The outcrop of limestone the path followed was an impressive bit of geology, worth seeing.

I came across a hollow just off the path which was a good place to stop for lunch – the stepped rock made for somewhere to put my sitmat.

Although it was a grey day it is interesting country to walk though – when I get back I will try and upload my Memory-map route.

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Wayport Internet Connection

/ Business / ,

I am staying at Pine Lakes, part of Diamond Resorts for the next week and as the resort advertised high speed wireless Internet access (and there is an access point in my chalet with a good connection) I thought I would spend the £27.50 on a weeks access. Not cheap but I thought it would work at least.

DON’T buy it if you stay here.

I have plenty of experience of connecting any device to any wifi network – this took nearly an hour to get the pages to come up and accept my expensive code (expensive if it doesn’t work) and once done it is dead slow. I have been waiting for nearly 15 minutes for my blog homepage to refresh on my laptop. Again if you stay here don’t buy it.

I will take it up with reception in the morning. Watch this space to see how they deal with it.

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