Second boondocking site

I have moved from the Thousand Trails Campground to BLM land close by.  Ground is kind of soft from the rain we had earlier but not bad. Here is what my site looks like. 

I had my awning up for a while in the early afternoon because the sun was hot and I wanted to shade my refrigerator.  

The solar panels will have a rough time charging the batteries I think. The sun is low on the horizon and goes behind some hills around 4:30 or so. I am only going to be here for a couple of days so I shouldn't have any problem. I could tilt the panels, but I don't think it is worth the effort of getting on the roof. I just won't be running my crock pot this time. I cooked up a pot yesterday and I have a couple of meals left from that and lots of soup so I'm good. 

Life is good. 

Snow and an early Christmas gift

After finally venturing out after all the rain we had, I saw this on a nearby hill. 

SNOW!  Yuk, time to leave.  Monday I will be leaving this area and heading south.  Filled up my propane tank so I can keep warm in the days to come. I will be sad to leave this Thousand Trails campground because they have everything I need right here. After this I will need to find things like propane, water, dump stations and garbage disposal. Should be exciting though. 

I received something like an early Christmas present today. I have read all the books by Lee Child except for his latest release.  Never Go Back was priced at $10.99 as a Kindle book. I won't pay that much for a book so I put it on eReaderIQ way back when it first came out.  eReaderIQ.com is a service that keeps an eye on Amazon prices and will send an email when the book price drops to whatever you set as an acceptable price.  So the price went all the way down to $3.49!  I don't know if this is just a short time thing or not, but I jumped on it right away.  Can't wait to start reading it but I have to finish the one I am on first. Should be done tomorrow sometime. Guess I won't be getting much else done for a while. 

Life is good. 

Rain, rain and more rain

It has been raining almost constantly for about three days.  Yesterday it started clearing up for the first time in a long time.

Sure is nice to see some blue sky again. I have been spoiled since I came to Arizona since this is the first time there has been any amount of rain. 

My afternoon walks were done in the rain and I felt like I was back in Oregon again. In Oregon, I would have to wait until July to see the end of the rain whereas here the weather should clear up this week. 

Not much else happening here, I have been doing inside cleanup and rearranging things. I have been involved in a spirited email thread going with my family about the weather. The Wisconsin group bragging about their ability to withstand bitter cold and calling the southwest group wimps while the southwest group claims superior intelligence for moving where the weather is better.  All in fun of course. 

I can well remember the snowstorm we had in Oregon in the winter of 2008-2009 when my poor Born Free was covered in snow for almost a week. Fortunately I was able to keep nice and warm inside.

Here is a picture of that. 

I hope I won't have to live in my RV in that kind of winter again.  This was when I was still working and couldn't follow warmer weather. Usually it just rained all winter. 

Just checked the weather.  Today the high was listed as 41, tomorrow it should be 63. Nice!

Life is good.

Dinner is done

Dinner in my new Thermos Nissan Thermal Cooker turned out great. Very similar to cooking it in my crock pot but using less energy. 

Here are the two units after I pulled the inner pot out of the thermos.  The inner pot can be used with an induction cooktop. 

What the end result looks like. It tasted much better than it looks here. 

Here is my portion for tonight. It made 4 generous meals for me. 

It is definitely a keeper.  Anyone want a small crock pot?

Life is good. 

Cabin pictures and thermal cooking

Here are the pictures of the cabin I am staying in this week. 

I am getting spoiled living in this luxury!  At the same time I am looking forward to getting back in my RV on Friday because I miss it. It is always good to get back home. 

I ordered a Nissan Thermal Cooker and it came today so I had to cook my dinner for today in it to see how well it works. Here it is cooking my dinner.

No electricity needed. I put what I normally put in my crock pot in the inner pot and put it on the range to bring it to a boil. After it boiled for a couple of minutes, I put the inner pot into the outer thermos and will let it set for 3 or 4 hours.  At that point it should be ready to eat. So I only need energy to get it to the boiling point and then I put it in the thermos to continue the cooking. If it works, I will not need to have my crock pot using electricity for 3 to 4 hours. This type of cooking has been used in Japan for quite a while so I know it works, I just need to figure out the optimal procedure for what I usually cook. Tonight's dinner is barley, black beans, corn, tomatoes, green beans, celery and a few spices. 

I will try to remember to take photos of the final result and post them later tonight. 

Life is good. 

Cabin life

Moved into a cabin last night. I get a free week a year with my Thousand Trails membership and figured I better take advantage of it before the end of the year when I would lose this years week. The cabin is nice in some ways because I have a comfortable recliner and a working microwave for popcorn. The bed was more comfortable than I expected. However, the furnace is right next to the bed and it sounds like a jet taking off right next to me. Needless to say, I turned the heat way down for the night. 

I have some pictures but they are on my phone and are not loading on my iPad very fast. Since I am back down in a valley again, my internet is slow. I will post the pictures when I can. 

Life is good. 

Meeting bloggers I follow

There are several blogs I follow religiously and I have been able to meet up with the owners of two of those blogs this year.

I met Sue of rvsueandcrew when I was in Montana. A wonderful lady and a joy to visit with.

This week I met with Bob Wells of cheaprvliving.com at his campsite near me. It was great visiting with him as I have followed his blog for a long time and picked up lots of info from the blog on outfitting a van for camping and how to prepare for boondocking.

Also at Bob's campsite were Forrest and Beth who own Alpine Tour Company in Ridgway, Colorado and had taken Bob on a Jeep tour.  They are a young couple enjoying life while they still can and you can follow their adventures at 3upadventures.com   Their company website is alpinetourco.com

It is really neat to meet up with people you feel you know after following their blogs for so long.

Success!

Today is day 7 of my first boondocking experiment and it was a piece of cake. I knew I could go for one week on my tanks because I do it all the time in campgrounds. This was more a test of the solar and to see if I could use only half of my resources in case I want to go 2 weeks.

The results are:

I used about 1/4 of my tank of propane.  A lot of that was probably my furnace and I can easily cut back on that. I turned my furnace back to barely on last night and I was comfortable. I think the low was in the low 30's last night but the Born Free is well insulated so it holds on to the heat of the day. 

I used less than half of the fresh water tank and half of the water I use for drinking and cooking.  That was without drastic conservation, just using my usual methods of conserving water. 

My grey and black tanks are a little over half full I think. Hard to tell with those guys!  I can easily solve that by using a portable toilet some or all the time and dumping some grey water into the black tank. 

I have all the power I need from the solar. I had one cloudy day and that was no problem. As long as most days are sunny, I have no need to conserve on power based on my lifestyle.  

As far as food goes, based on my Whole Food, Plant Based eating I can have enough food to go for months. I just need to stock up on things like potatoes, rice and barley to be good for a long time. I also like to get some fresh vegetables and fruit to last the first week. If I run out, it's okay because I have a large amount of dehydrated vegetables to live off of.  I get dehydrated vegetables and beans online from Harmony House and since they are compact and lightweight, I can have a large stock on hand. 

So based on the last week, I can easily go 2 weeks or more off grid. 

Life is good. 

Cloudy day

Actually had a somewhat cloudy day today. First one in a long time. I decided not to do a crockpot meal today because I was not sure how long it would be cloudy and I didn't know how well the solar system would work. It was charging the battery well even with the clouds and I may have been okay but decided not to chance it.

Here were the morning clouds.

The afternoon clouds. 

The evening clouds with the hills in the distance lit up.

The batteries were charged up to 100% just slightly later than normal. 

Life is good.

Hikes and sunsets

Not much going on here. I am just relaxing and enjoying the peace and quiet of the area. Got back to my knitting again. It has been a while since I have done any serious knitting and I had a desire to knit something today. I turned on my XM radio and sat back and knitted most of the day. 

In the late afternoon I went for a walk on the roads to get some exercise before dinner. 

Yesterday I walked Forest road 361 for a mile or so. Here are some pictures I took on the way back.

You can see my Born Free just to the right of the middle. Just a white spot. 

Here are some pictures of the terrain in the area. 

Some sunset pictures taken from my site. 

My solar is working great, easily keeping up with my electrical usage. So far, the batteries have never gone below 82% used.  Fortunately, the weather has been sunny with just one day of clouds in the afternoon.  Tomorrow it will be time to cook up another batch of meals in my crockpot. 

Life is good. 

Solar report

It was really cold here last night so I had the furnace running a bit last night. I like to keep it at around 55 for good sleeping so the furnace didn't run too much.  This morning the batteries were at 85% and were already charging a bit even though the sun was hardly up.

By 10 AM the batteries were at 93%.  I had been online for a couple of hours with the Jetpack charging the whole time. I decided to start up my crock pot for the day. The batteries showed +6A before I started cooking. I started the built in 2000 Watt inverter and turned the crock pot to high, looked at the remote monitor and it dipped down a bit then right back to +6A again.  I checked the solar input and it had jumped up to 14A coming in. Cool!  The solar is handling the inverter, crock pot, and the Jetpack as well as still charging the batteries!

Now at 12:00, the batteries are at 100% and dinner smells really good. 

Life is good.