My last month in Sardinia, work and fun!

It’s not too bad to be back home between lakes and cows after more than one month spent in Sardinia. Yes, I’m lucky to have had the chance to stay there for such a long period. That was possible thanks to my girlfriend’s family who has a house there, thanks to the fact that she’s in maternity leave and because I can work remotely.

In this month I’ve taken two weeks of full vacation, but I kept working for the rest of the time and I’d like to share some advice on my experience.

Sardinia is not known to be the land of good Internet connections and the flat doesn’t have a landline. That’s why I bought some hardware to have the most stable connection possible. After some days of attempts, I finally reached good results with a ping of 60 ms and a download rate of 5 mbits. Skype voice and video calls were awesome!

I didn’t have too many choices, as the only carrier that covers this area is TIM. I chose a package for 25€ per month with 20GB of data. It was enough, but I had to be careful not to download too many data. Videos were strictly forbidden.

After some research and after reading some reviews I bought a Netgear Aircard. That was a bit expensive, but it did its job quite well. It can handle up to 10 devices. The only bad thing is that the battery will be empty after 5/6 hours of usage.

Since I knew the connection wouldn’t have been really stable I decided to order a 3G antenna from Amazon. It was a bit tricky to setup, because at the beginning I didn’t know the position of the nearest cell. I also had to buy an additional adapter to fit the TS9 port of the Netgear Aircard.

Since we were there with a small child and a mountain dog, I knew we wouldn’t have been able to stay on the beach during the hottest hours of the day, so having to work wasn’t really a pain. I usually started my day at 8 am after a good breakfast. After lunch I could even move on the terrace with the beautiful view on the sea. At 5 pm we were ready for the beach!

To be honest, I have to admit that my productivity wasn’t at its best for several reasons: the house is small and with a newborn you can’t really find a quiet environment. Despite these distractions my happiness raised and I felt no stress at all.