About that stuff...

As I said last time, I'm not into RV-ing as a Great Renunciation of Stuff.  One of the reasons I got a Class C was to have enough room for me and the things I want to use on the road.  I see pictures from  people with small rigs and they all seem to be overflowing with ... stuff!

It's probably very un-Green of me, but I'm a believer in plastic boxes, available pretty cheap from the likes of Target and (for heavier duty containers) Home Depot.   Like so:

The tool box moves between the RV and the car trunk. It's what I think I may need on the road, in any vehicle.  The small plastic box is an example of what I use to organize stuff which I may use either on the road or at home; this applies as much to shaving gear as it does to electronics.

The larger boxes contain stuff which will have a permanent home in the RV and not much relevance elsewhere.


One of my RV-related activities today (When the fog clears. Yes, fog in the desert!)  is to go measure the storage compartments under the coach and see what size boxes will fit where.  Is it a little twisted that I'm actually enjoying this part?

Cloudy and cool ...

The last couple of days here in Tucson haven't been really conducive to going out and doing much.  Nice to have a warm comfortable place. Which leads me to think about RV travel.  A few months back, I spent a long weekend with a couple of friends up in the White Mountains of northern Arizona.  They were in a tent.  I was in the RV.  It rained.  It was then I realized that the RV is pretty comfortable even in less-than-ideal situations: warm, dry, and with all the windows, fairly light even on a cloudy day.  I don't deal well with dark and gloomy.  In a way, it helped validate the decision I made not to get a van-style RV, in spite of the inconveniences of parking and navigating in traffic.

I've been watching a really first-rate documentary on the "RV lifestyle" on YouTube.  It's a fully professional product, technically and creatively.  It runs about an hour, but I recommend it highly:

"Without Bound"

There's a couple of themes here which don't describe the way I feel.  Many of these people seem to subscribe to beliefs which border on conspiracy theories.  "They" don't want "Us" to live free.  "They" want us to keep buying stuff so "They" can control us.   I do think that income inequality, or resource inequality, is one of the major issues of our day.  But I've never felt the need to stick it to the Man, possibly because I've always been The Man ... a middle-class white American male. And I'm well aware of the tension between neat new toys and simplifying life.   Thing is,  I'm not sure I need to simplify my life.  I'm retired, with  steady income. I don't need to buy economy brand dog food, although I do grumble at the cost of Eukanuba.  I've never really lived some of what the full time RV'ers are fleeing: the rat race of bigger houses and newer cars and classy clothes.  The height of my sartorial splendor for much of my life has come from LL Bean or (more recently) Carhartt.  I chose an academic career because it gave me some flexibility in my daily life and in its overall arc.  I drove a small pickup truck more or less into the ground, and I now drive the smallest hatchback Hyundai makes.   Oh yeah, and now I have the Beast ...

I've crunched the numbers six ways from Sunday.  My fixed housing expenses are something like 20% of my after-tax income.  I have no long-term debt other than the mortgage which is included in that figure.  I have good health insurance (Medicare plus supplement) which isn't tied to any one location or provider. I can afford to go on the road and maintain my "sticks and bricks" home in Tucson.  Moreover, if I need to, I can afford to spend the occasional night in a motel and eat out if I need a fix of conventional living.

If this sounds like I'm trying to talk myself into something, I am.

A lot of my hesitation about just taking off and hitting the road comes from fear.  More fear of some kind of vehicle problem than medical emergencies or getting mugged.  I seem to be drawn to staying in places which are less "civilized" than the basic RV parks which are everywhere.  So what do I do if I have a flat tire driving into some relatively remote campsite on BLM land?  Maybe with no cell service?  Or if the RV has some kind of conniption fit and just won't go?   Well, I make sure I have the tools to change a tire if I need to.  And practice changing a tire in the comfort of the parking lot.  And I get a Verizon hot spot which will maximize my cell coverage.  And I maybe get an RV-centered road emergency policy which will tow the big guy to service.  And be prepared for some hellacious service costs.   And I make sure that people at home know where I'm headed, and check in on schedule. And I stop fretting and Just Do It.

Thinking ahead

This won't be about sorting out anything physical.  I'm still working on that project: Emma and I paid a quick visit to the RV to bring back all the tools that were there so I can organize what should go where.

No, what this is about is where I go when I do hit the road.  I've been reading a lot of video and other blogs (and blogs, I guess) from people who spend a LOT of time in their RV.  They like to call themselves nomads,  particularly the full-timers.  These folks, some of them, have decided live on the road.  They have various styles: some do it rather grandly, some in pretty frugal ways.   Some are constantly on the road, others settle in for a while at locations which please them.  Some are retired, some are restless kids.

I've provided pointers to some of the blogs these folks maintain, over on the right.

I'm pretty clear that full-time nomad just doesn't suit me right now.  I like having a "sticks and bricks" place to come home to.   But I'm edging toward a style of travel which would be new to me, and more than a little scary: Wandering.   Just taking off, say, northward in the summer, and winding up who knows where.  Maybe Canada, in the summer.  Maybe Mexico in the winter once I get over serious anxieties about travel where I don't speak the language. Maybe (gasp!) Florida?

The few trips I've done so far have been pretty closely planned: campground reservations made ahead, all that.  So just taking off and seeing where the road goes with no specific destination and no hard and fast schedule -- that's really scary stuff to the control freak here. But I'm getting more and more comfortable with the Beast: I think I understand its components and its (few) foibles.   And in the words of the immortal Dr Bronner: if not now, when?

The problem is, as it has been, the dog.

Sorting stuff out

The Brits have a wonderful expression about getting "sorted."  It translates, roughly, as "organized and understood" and can be applied to one's current overall life situation or to a specific problem.

Here's mine at the moment:

I've been going back and forth between the house and the RV storage lot getting stuff done.   It's my DIY side.  But the tools are often elsewhere.  Last week I needed something at the house which was at the RV, and yesterday the reverse.  No biggie here, with no fixed schedule and plenty of other things to do.  But when I take off for a while in the Beast, it'd be good to know I've got the right tools.

And not a lot of dead weight.

So I pulled everything out of the RV and most everything out of the closets here at the house, and I'm trying to get it all understood and organized.  Sorted.  How many sets of diagonal cutting pliers do I need?  End wrenches? Channel Locks?

Part of the problem is that some of this goes way back;  I can remember my father using THAT bulbous-handled screwdriver... But it's absurd to own this many duplicates of tools.  I think one outcome will be a big box of perfectly good tools which goes to Good Will.

Today's high is supposed to be in the mid-seventies.  It'll drop off to the mid-sixties in a few days, there's no expectation of an immediate return to the really cold temps of a few days ago.  You folks in the East and  Midwest are in for it, huh?

Feeling smug -- ruh-roh!

I'm down at the RV again, doing an inventory of the interior cubbies.  Lots to throw out and reorganize. I brought the new space heater, both because I wanted to play with the new toy and because I didn't see any reason to give it house room at 614.  It's warm in the sun today --- air temp near here is 59.2º near here.  But it was pretty chilly in the rig.  I revved the little heater up and put it on HI and in maybe 15 minutes it was comfortable.  I don't have a thermometer with me, but it's take-the-fleece-off warm in here.  I plugged a little fan I have into the inverter, and that sure helped... if I'm reading the info right from the solar panel, the panel is supplying what's running the fan and also changing up the little battery on a floor-sweeper I keep down here.  I am consuming propane to run the space heater, but still I'm feeling quite self-sufficient.  The laptop is running on battery and so is the TMO wifi hot spot.

Back to work, then home and late lunch.

Saturday chores

It was really cold last night, so I think I probably did the right thing by putting antifreeze in the pipes.  In Tucson,  27.8º F qualifies as really cold!  We're done with that for a while; the daily highs are forecast to go up steadily and by next week we'll be in the low 70's!  It may flirt with freezing tonight, but that's about it.

(Side note) -- I have electric heater wires on the exposed pipes on my roof.  They turn on and off via a WEMO switched outlet, which in turn is controlled by an IFTT recipe.  I've wondered how much that's costing me -- less than a plumber to repair a burst pipe, which I did do one year when it got down to 17º when I was away.  Well, now I know.  Recently I got a gadget called a "Kilawatt" which tells me how much power a given circuit is using.  The roof system, it turns out, pulls about 13 amps. The Killawatt also has an elapsed time meter which records usage over time in Kilowatt-hours.  Using this and my electric bill, I now know that it costs me $1.26 to run the system overnight.  Cool!  Not as bad as I feared.

I bought the KW to see how much power various units consume if I take them on the road and run them through the inverter.  That's the connection with this blog, if I need one.

I got a new toy for the rig, as I said I would.  It's a catalytic heater which runs off the same small propane bottles that my traveling gas grill does.

You can gauge the size from the whiskey bottles nearby.  It really does crank out heat!  The deal with catalytic heaters is that they consume oxygen.  As long as you provide a little ventilation, they're safe in a closed space, at least one as big as a small cabin or a duck blind or an RV.  And the RV has a propane detector and a CO2 detector and a smoke alarm in case of Idunnowhat.

This arrived at the house while I was puttering around on the rig down at the storage yard.  So it hasn't yet been tested in situ. I hooked up the solar panel and put some more juice into the starter battery, took an inventory of all the storage cubbies, and re-organized them.  I'd more or less thrown stuff wherever it would fit last summer, and not surprisingly that resulted in not being able to find hardly anything.  There's only one cubby which is the right dimension to take the solar panel when it's folded up, so that's what started my housekeeping burst.

I think the next step is to look at how the interior storage is being used, and maybe to figure out why the kitchen drawers don't slide smoothly. It'll be even warmer tomorrow, so maybe I'll spend time down there a bit again.  I might also take it for a short spin and fill up the tank with $1.99 gas!

Winterizing

This is my first winter with the Beast.  I'd thought rather vaguely about whether I ought to do something about freezing temperatures.  But I kept thinking I might take it out sometime soon.  So ... I managed to not do anything about winterizing.  It's gonna get down the 25 tonight, according to Weather Underground, so. Besides, it sounded hard.

Not so much.  I got three gallons of pink RV antifreeze at Pep Boys, watched a couple of YouTube videos, and went at it.  Oh, and I read the directions.  Yes, the Owner's Manual says what to do.

So I did it.  The hardest part was finding the backside of the hot water heater so I could bypass it when I filled the pipes with antifreeze.  Of course: behind the drawer underneath the closet in the bathroom.

Or maybe the hardest part was waiting an hour for the main water tank to drain (I swear that machine has prostate issues!)

But it's done.  Total cost $15 for the antifreeze, and I have enough left over for next winter.

Does this sh*t spoil?

The no-longer mysterious Water Department

The whole took a couple of hours, and engendered a bit of tension:  Frozen pipes in your RV toilet sounds messy and, well, expensive.  But it was simpler than I thought it would be (life lesson there, huh?) And now it's almost cocktail hour.

Oh yeah: Happy New Year -- if there's anyone out there.