On every corner in the states there is a Starbucks and an Apple iSomething store or at least a store that gives you the ability to peruse apple products. Before we left, I upgraded my 2009 MacBook Pro to the latest and greatest 2016 MacBookPro with all the bells and whistles. That of course means a bazillion adapters to accomodate for the new USB-C connectors. All has been working swimmingly with the new MacBook Pro…until it wasn’t.
Less than 6 months old, and the charging brick gives out, now I can’t charge my laptop at all, its down to 30% and when that is over, no dice. I have the 2009 as a backup, and it works, just a bit slower. This computer has 12volt and 110volt chargers. Of course the new computer has completely different connectors and I haven’t located a 12volt charger for it yet. Ugh.
Today’s mission find one of these.
Google said there is a iCurraco on the island and its close to the places we have already walked and wandered by. So that was the destination. Take the bus to downtown and go to Digicel first to figure out what happened to our data (for some reason they stopped giving us data at 5gb instead of the 18gb we purchased). That in itself was fun, standing in line for a while only to be told, she sent an email to the support team and would call us back when it was fixed. Uhhh.. I walked all the way to your store for this? No expectations, so we wandered around and turned on the phone never believing they would call, but within 15mins the call came in stating it was all fixed, and sure enough the missing 14gb were credited back to our account.
Google Maps, its an android device after all, was now in business and we were off, 3km walk through town, over to Otrobanda, to the supposed location of iCuracao. Nothing but a home there, a secondary search returned another location another 4km away which was also incorrect. Switch to the Maps.me app on the iPhone. This map gave us a new location, in another direction of course. So what else do we have to do, keep walking stopping at every convenience store for a cold “small beer” to keep the legs moving, and hydration in balance. We get close, and it looks like we are to walk down the “Ring” highway, so we jump the guardrail between cars, following some local kids and make it across. Turns out to be a shopping mecca with hardware stores, house wares, and supermarkets and low and behold an iWorld store.
Not expecting to actually find the charger, can’t have your hopes up too high when dealing with bleeding edge technology. But low and behold they had three for the 13 inch and 2 for the 15 inch MacBookPros. Oh my, I’ll take that one and it was only 10% more than what they cost in the states, score!
Success: MacBookPro gets a second chance at life with a new charger.
On the way back to the bus stop, we came across a Kooyman and had to stop in to look around. One, it was air conditioned, and two it is a really awesome store.
Megastore Kooyman
Well now to get back, at least to our bus route that is, quick check of the Maps.Me showed we had another 3 kilometers to get to a bus stop on our route. We pushed on and went straight to the bar “ItsLit” where we had stopped the other day, and thought there was a happy hour at 5pm, course it didn’t start till 7pm – Doh, we had drinks anyway after a well deserved successful mission.
Oh and we found me some new tennis shoes for hiking if need be as the Sperry shoes I used to own, disintegrated during the Antigua Race week.
Quinton had showed us the Bus Schedule app where you can see where the buses are so at the last minute we paid our tab, and made the last few mins of Happy Hour at Pirates (again).
After I had made Christine walk all over the place, she wanted pork chops and smashers for dinner, so that’s what we had. Concluded a good long day…