SasEz! Simple & Sustainable Living…

Well it’s new for me at least and I’m having fun with it It doesn’t post my ink in here like the ink blog plugin for live Writer does, but it Does let me Write this entry With ink! And I’m writing directly on my browser Window too.

Pretty Cool

I don’t care for the idea of RV parks. I’ve lived in mobile home parks before, and it’s not too fun having your house squeezed into a tiny space between two others. I’m not a fan of apartment living either, and mobile home parks are a bit too much like apartments for my taste. Unfortunately I get the same impression from RV parks too.

We’re not overly social people. William needs a bit more social buzz around him than I do but it’s more of a desire for the buzz of civilization than it is any real desire to flitter around making small talk with one or more people. And we have a dog. Our dog has apparently decided to be completely anti-social, and that makes things a little more challenging for us when we’re traveling.

Onyx adopted us when he was roughly 3 months old. It was a cold night in November, a day or two before Thanksgiving, when he showed up on our front porch and tried to find warmth in the porch rug. I couldn’t leave him out in the cold so I brought him in and put him in the bathroom for the night. William said “we are absolutely NOT keeping it!” He didn’t want me to touch this adorable little puppy who was so happy to be inside. He didn’t want me to look at it, talk to it or anything else that might get me attached

Needless to say, my efforts to find out who he belonged to got me nowhere, and Onyx has been with us ever since. That was about 6 or 7 years ago.

Somehow in those early days, Onyx decided he didn’t want anyone else coming near this wonderful new family he had found. So he barks at people… all people… and he goes ballistic when he sees other animals. Since he’s never been exposed to children under the age of 10 for more than a brief few minutes, he can’t seem to figure out what they are. And the smaller a child is, the more he seems to think it’s a little furry animal.

This is definitely a challenge for us. Not only does it wear on our patience at times, but we have to be extra diligent where ever we go. I often say having him is a lot like having a wayward two year old child. You can never take your eye off him for a second. He is very smart, very loving and loyal, but also very territorial.

In time the plan is to occasionally put him in a doggy daycare for a few hours so we can have time just for us. For the time being though, we don’t go out to eat at sit down restaurants, we don’t visit fairs and festivals, and we don’t just wander around town exploring.

We also don’t do RV parks.

Now even if we didn’t have Onyx I suspect we still wouldn’t use an RV park much. I don’t relish the idea of hearing other people’s kids, dogs, music or generators. I also can’t comprehend paying $20-$30+ per night for little more than a parking space. I like the peace and quiet of a remote camping spot, and I like having a beautiful view. I also love being immersed in nature.

What we do is generally called boondocking, drydocking, primitive or dispersed camping. We pick a National Forest area, find a passable primitive forest road and follow it till we find a break in the trees that looks like it might be a quiet and private dispersed campsite.

Now the fact that we have a fairly primitive camping setup so far lends to this travel style too. Even though we now have our cargo trailer camper, it’s still little more than a hard tent for the most part. This means the bulk of our activities are done outside. We can cook inside the trailer – and we have during bad weather – but the door is left open for safety reasons.

Our chairs and table get setup outside. Most of our cooking and even working is done outside too. Our bathroom is a bucket toilet that we use like a composting toilet, and at the moment it is outside as well, and if we’re not in a private enough location we hang a tarp for privacy. All of these things just wouldn’t feel overly comfortable in a public campground or RV park.

I don’t mind state parks campgrounds once in awhile, because out west these tend to run $5-$10 per night, have more space between campsites, and we can refill our water jugs plus take showers in most cases, so they end up filling multiple needs for one low cost.

Usually however, we simply fill our water jugs when we go into town for a resupply run, and use a solar water bag for our showers. In this part of the country there are self serve water machines in most towns. You can buy water at $0.25 per gallon or 5 gallons for $1.

Up until a couple of weeks ago we had 31 gallons of water carrying capacity, and we’re now upgraded to a full 50 gallons. This is enough for 10 days of dry camping when we’re being careful with our water usage.

Maybe if we ever get around to upgrading to a fancier camper or RV we’ll start using the parks and public campgrounds a bit more but I have my doubts. Onyx likes the quiet and I love having the doors thrown wide open to the forest.

Before embarking on our new travel living journey, we tried our best to make plans which would allow us to live and travel as sustainably as possible. And since I’m a writer and photographer who makes money online, our priority was to make sure we had a way to generate electricity. I’d already chosen solar power as my preferred method, and had actually been experimenting with various passive solar techniques the last year or so we lived in the house.

Just before selling everything and hitting the road though, we invested in a cheap starter solar panel system. Now this isn’t a top of the line power generator but we had to go cheap. We also wanted to experiment a bit and see how well it traveled before we put too much money on the line.

This set of solar panels came in a kit from Amazon, and it included everything we needed except a battery. It boasts 60 watts of power generation during peak times and conditions but we currently have nothing set up to try and gauge its actual output.

The battery we bought for the system is a cheap $20 lawn and garden battery from WalMart, so I suspect we’re not getting nearly as much power storage from the setup as we probably could be. Overall though, the system works really well and I – after having paid $100-$300 per month in electricity bills for over 5 years – have fallen completely and totally in love with solar power!

The one other solar device we had before even leaving on our first trip was a small solar yard light. This was also a cheapy from WalMart, but at around four dollars I’ve kind of fallen in love with it too.

We’ve found it comes in handy for almost everything. We can remove the top part and use the bare bulb as a half decent flash light or reading light, and it’s wonderful as a general night light too. We simply set it out by the solar panels during the day when we’re in camp, or I sit it on the dashboard in the Jeep when I’m driving. It charges easily regardless of what the weather is like, and with a strong charge it lasts all night long. An on/off switch would be nice but for as cheap as this thing was I’m not complaining. It’s fairly simply to tuck the light under a blanket or cloth when we want it “turned off”.

Over time we’ve collected a couple of other small solar panels to charge a radio and a tent light, and we’re enjoying it so much we plan to add to the collection as we go.

When we first started traveling we had the solar panels disassembled and padded thickly in a large bin with sleeping bags. Each time we made camp we’d put the frame together, attach each panel, then hook it all up.

As you can imagine this was a little time consuming and it took an enormous amount of space in the Jeep. Once we traded our tent for a cargo trailer though, and then started outfitting that for our lifestyle, we ended up with a much easier solution which allows us to simply slide the panel assembly out and attach the legs, then plug everything in.

So why don’t we simply mount the panels onto either the Jeep or trailer? Well… for now that’s an ongoing debate Having the panels mounted would eliminate all setup and take down time plus allow us to charge even while driving down the road. The biggest problem though, is that when we make camp we try to park the Jeep and trailer in a shady spot so they don’t get too hot inside. And that of course, wouldn’t work for generating power if the solar panels were on top.

So for now we brainstorm how that could change in the future.

In June 2009, my husband and I became empty nesters. Other than our 60 lb dog “Onyx” – he’s a lot like having a perpetual 2 year old in tow – we no longer have children living with us.

We decided to do something quite different for us once the kids were grown and gone. We’ve heard plenty about people retiring, buying a fancy RV, and traveling all over the country of course, so we decided we’d like to try something similar ourselves. Never mind the fact that I’m only 40, he’s younger than that, and we can’t afford a fancy RV yet.

The initial idea was to take an extended camping trip while we save money to buy our own land. I work online so it doesn’t matter where we are in the world. As long as I have occasional internet access I should theoretically be able to keep the income flowing.

So we bought a small solar panel generator system to power my computer with where ever we might be, sold everything that didn’t have to be kept, put the rest in storage and hit the road.

We started out with just our Jeep Cherokee, a large tent and basic supplies. Before we even hit the road the first time we discovered we had way too much stuff with us though. The Jeep was packed so tight there was barely anywhere for the dog to sit. We tolerated it on the drive from Artesia New Mexico to Tucson Arizona, but our first order of business once we got there was to unload the Jeep and lighten our load considerably.

We went to Tucson first to visit family we hadn’t seen in several years, and we’d already decided Arizona was going to be something of a home base for us. Since it has great weather most of the year, and boasts 300+ days of sunshine it seemed like an ideal location to try our experiment. Having family in the state was a persuading factor too.

The first three months of our new lifestyle was a bit trying at times to say the least. We were stressed by very tight finances and a looming cross country trip deadline.

We had been living in a rental house for the last 5-6 years so that wasn’t something we were able to sell. We did sell 80%-90% of our belongings before heading out, but since we’ve lived fairly frugally over the years that only netted us a small bit of cash to get started with.

We also ended up driving much more than we’d planned to that first month… averaging about 300 miles per week going back and forth from Tucson to various camping spots. We spent a lot of time and money learning just how much we didn’t know in those early weeks.

One glaring example: When we first started out we had just 8 gallons of water carrying capacity. Needless to say one of our first expenses was to buy water storage containers.

Our second month out was August, and we learned that not every camping spot will work well for our solar power. In fact, we’ve discovered our ideal spots have a shady place for our tent (now a cargo trailer), plus a sunny spot for the solar panels. August was stressful because we’d committed to being back in New Mexico for a family gathering but we bent the suspension on the Jeep a week before we were supposed to go. The quick trip to New Mexico convinced us to trade our tent for a trailer and the end of August was when we needed to be in South Carolina, but money was getting slimmer by the day.

We got through it all… went across country and back… then proceeded to spend most of September resting. Details on some of the highlights will be posted here over time. Those which are already available and future posts can be found by browsing the archives section or following the links scattered through this post.

I recently discovered an entire small world of other nomadic travelers, and the stories inspired me to finally get some more of my own updates online here.

When so much content was lost here back in August, the thought of writing everything from scratch was discouraging to say the least… so I’ve avoided it. Income has slowed to a trickle this month particularly too, so that hasn’t helped my confidence or enthusiasm much.

After reading various travel stories from others though, I have to admit I feel better about some of the decisions we’ve made and I’m much more motivated to start writing again. So I’ll start filling in some of the basics which were recently lost, then go from there… hopefully a little more regularly