[laumars]

> I suppose the thing I should actually do is route over an SSH SOCKS tunnel to some server I control, which would work fine.

This is what I do. The only danger with that over a regular VPN is anything not part of your browsers standard stream will not be sent over the proxy. This includes browser plugins as well. Thankfully Flash and Java are generally disabled by default, but it's still worth baring that limitation in mind.

Despite this, SSH SOCKS is still my preferred method as well.