How should I handle page refreshes in EmberJS?

As I understand from the EmberJS Guide to Routing, you should specify the model you want a route to load in the Route's model hook. The model hook may return a promise, and if it does, the route will pause until the promise resolves.

Therein lies my problem: this approach works fantastically under normal use cases (user triggers a transition from any other route into the route in question.) The problem arises if the user is currently at the route in question.

If the user triggers a page refresh (using the browser's refresh button, or ctrl+r or whatever other trigger there might be, the promise in the model hook causes the user to sit at a blank white page until that promise returns. In large dataset cases, this can be a handful of seconds, which does not make for a great user experience.

So, how do I resolve this issue?

The only solution I have developed is to trigger the data load in the route's activate hook, and manually set the controller's model when that promise returns. I don't like doing this, because I'm circumventing the entirety of Ember's model framework.

I would like the application template to render before the model hook hangs the page, at a bare minimum. Any guidance on how to resolve this would be greatly appreciated.

In case the context is necessary: as the tags imply, I am using Ember-Data. I'm utilizing the RESTAdapter almost entirely out-of-the-box, unmodified.