Category: Personal

January 3rd 2020

Happy Friday! It’s six o’clock in the morning, the skies are clear and the temperature is 50 or 10 degrees, so all and all not a bad start to the day. Sunrise is not till 7:41 so we haven’t bottomed out yet but we are within a degree or two of the low temperature. We have been operating totally on battery power for two nights and while everything has worked as expected we are depleting our batteries faster that we have been able to recharge them with solar.

When we pulled in to the BLM land on Wednesday afternoon the lot was very full, so we ended up being parked with Thunder facing almost due south, so the sun rises on our left side and sets on our right, this does not afford me the opportunity to tip the panels to maximize our solar intake. So we only got a partial solar charge yesterday so as I check our status this morning we have used well over 70% of our available battery power supply. So my plan is to take a walk around this morning and find a parking area that will have us facing more easterly, then I can tip the solar panels to maximize our solar intake and hopefully start to gain on the recharge of the battery bank.

Well I decided not to move Thunder, as we are moving in a few days anyway, I made the corporate decision to just run our generator to see how well the batteries would accept a recharge from the inverter/charger. With the old batteries and inverter/charger they would accept up to 70 amps of bulk charge but it would only charge at that rate for about thirty minutes, before dropping into the absorption charge cycle. But after close to two hours of charging the rate of charge on the lithium batteries is still close to 100 amps, now I have understood this to be true from all my research, but seeing it is just a bit more than impressive. So we were able to bring the battery level of charge up 25% in less that two hours of generator run time, so by ten o’clock the solar is carrying the total coach load but not adding anything into the battery bank.

If Miss Laurie is feeing up to it, we will venture off to the theatre today, as we want to see the most recent Star Wars movie, a matinee showing most likely, you know us and a theatre full of old grey haired farts…lol.

Friday afternoon update: Miss Laurie is still down with a cold so no movie today, and I changed my mind shortly after lunch and decided to reposition the coach, I was just so frustrated that we were only just covering the daily load with full sun, so I repositioned the coach to have us facing almost west. I then went to the roof to tilt three of the four solar panels to get better sun harvest. This is not my normal direction for tilting so I had to make some minor modifications, the panel that I did not tilt is being partially blocked by the front air conditioner so the benefit would have be limited, considering the difficulty of reworking that panel.

That 20 plus amps is what is getting to the battery bank, the tilting of the solar panels has added the extra 10 plus amps.

The Holidays

Merry Christmas to everyone!

This will be our third Christmas as full timers away from our family, we will not be alone at Christmas, no there will be lots of people around here, other snowbirds and full timers. Some are part of our extended RV family, and others are friends and acquaintances from the parks and the area, no it’s not the same as family but we will have holiday FaceTime and calls with family and others. Of course we miss our family’s at this time of year, but this is a life choice we have made, and we still have no regrets.

There is just something special about laying back in my antigravity chair, enjoying seventy degrees of soul warming sunshine, and a ice cold cocktail in hand, that is oh so very hard to beat. We lived in an area that would often have snow on the ground for Christmas, but there is a lot more world without snow for Christmas than there is with. There is something about Christmas under a palm tree that is just about as special as Christmas under a snowy pine tree…just saying.

We see lots of snowbirds that head home for the holidays, and while it would be wonderful to see family, it also puts you in the middle of all the Christmas traffic and overcrowded airports, no I can’t see that being very enjoyable on any level. Then there are the snowbirds that don’t head south until after the holidays, leaving in cold winter weather with possible snowy or icy conditions. No none of these options much interest us at all, right now our overnight lows are about the same as the daytime highs back up north.

But what is happening in our lives is something that we never expected, as we set out to be nomads, you know break away from all those traditions that have always been in our lives. This issue really started to show up our first year, but is becoming a much bigger factor. It is this RV family that is becoming a very big portion of our lives, it started in January of 2018 when we met the Bannon’s for cocktails at “Beer Bellies Adult Day Care” in Quartzsite AZ. I had know Bob for a number of years like ten or more, but our wives had never met, now add to that that in the last five years or so we lived about 10 minutes apart, oh yah one more little detail, they had decided to sell their house and take an extended vacation, just a couple of months before we did. Now we are great friends and Laurie and Shari are as they say “RV sisters”, then there was Robert and Susan from Newfoundland, opened there live and let us in and they have become part of the family, and visited us a couple of times over this summer, again they are new full timers. Now last Christmas was spent with Bob and Shari on Sanibel Island in Florida with Bob and I enjoying a Caesar, while the girls scoured the beach for sea shells. And last winter added to the RV family with the addition of Ray and Karen full timers from Tennessee and Butch and Betty snowbirds from northern Ohio.

Now we find ourselves planning our travels and stops to include visits, even if it’s just for an extender four hour lunch, and if our plans appear to be not working out, some one steps in and plans a surprise gathering. Just a note, we have seen most of our RV family in the past three months, and are planning a little Quartzsite rendezvous in January, we are meeting Teresa and Anito for a week in LasVegas in mid February and hope to get together with Butch and Betty in April on our return trip back to Niagara.