On the road...
I'm writing this from a hotel room in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The Internet service came for free with the room, and unlike my last experience, this service doesn't suck. The room came with a very stripped-down Compaq PC (no hard drive, two RealTek NICs, and a cheap 15" IBM monitor), which, when booted, loads a Linux kernel from the network, and boots up into a minimal X configuration with Netscape 4.8. The second NIC in the machine is apparently to relay DHCP services to a laptop or other user-supplied machine, but the system keeps locking up solid the second I connect a live interface to it. They use Wine for displaying Microsoft Office documents, and have a few common plugins in place which makes the service mostly usable. The lack of a slightly more modern browser is a little disturbing, but I'd suspect they have plans to move to Mozilla in time. You can browse the filesystem with the browser, and it's basically busybox, X, netscape, and the minimum necessary to make the machine function. I'm fairly impressed, it's a damn sight better than that crappy LodgeNet offering. Now if they only made xterm and ssh available, I'd be a happy, happy guy.
The trip...
After being unsuccessful in finding a hotel room where we planned on stopping, we just drove to Minneapolis/St. Paul and grabbed a room there. I'm running on about five hours of sleep, since we didn't actually get into the room until about 3:30 in the morning. Today's drive was a helluva lot easier, although there was a small delay at the border; they seem to be hand-verifying citizenship and searching vehicles a lot more than last year.