Month: April 2012

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Late Sun Is Better Than No Sun!

The sun finally came out a couple of hours ago. It’s too late to reach a full charge again today, but it was enough to get some juice into the computer and iPad with enough left over to run the furnace tonight. I also enjoyed a couple of hours in the front room with a cat in my lap, enjoying the warmth of the sun. It’s freezing again, but it was nice while it lasted. 🙂

I would have gladly moved to an RV park today, but there isn’t a single one that opens before mid-May in this area. It’s supposed to be nasty again tomorrow, but the promise of full sun on Wednesday is keeping me from being too depressed about this less than stellar start to what was supposed to be an attempt at a solid month of boondocking. Well, I haven’t given up yet and as long as my fridge is running, everything’s fine. At this point, my batteries are reaching the end of their natural lifespan and I will shortly be plugged into 120V for an extended period of time. So I don’t care about running the batteries too low. But they seem to be performing well for the time being.

This afternoon, I ran into Walmart to grab a cheap pair of gloves. I cut off the tips when I came in. Ah; warm hands! Not having sore joints is definitely improving my mood. I should have done this ages ago.

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Dealing With Growing Disillusionment

I’ve had a lot of time in the last six months to think about what’s going to happen when it’s time to leave the east coast this fall. I have had a lot of thoughts rattling around in my brain that have been difficult to articulate precisely. These thoughts have been about the collision of my dream for a full-timing life and the reality of it.

My dream of full-time RVing is an American one. It falls apart in the face of Canadian reality. It is impossible in Canada to have the kind of freedom I wanted RVing to give me. There are a number factors which have led to my growing disillusionment with the full-time RV lifestyle in Canada:

-The Cost: living in this country is expensive and you don’t gain anything by being an RVer because Canada doesn’t have nice open tracts of land where you can spend months on end. I’ve stayed in places where RV park rent was twice the monthly payment on my house.

-The Constraints: It’s impossible to travel freely around Canada if you want to abide by the laws governing health care, vehicle registration, and insurance

-The Climate: There is no decent place to winter in this country.

My two months in the US last year confirmed that for me to continue RVing, I need to be able to travel in the US for a good part of the year. My expenses drop by 50% when I’m there. I can’t work there, so I need to spend the other part of the year in Canada to work and save money. But I can only do that if some nice folks will let me park in their yard or their driveway, otherwise all my income disappears into rent.

Since even before I hit the road, I thought of buying some land to use as a home base. The more I realised how much Canada was constraining me, the less I wanted to buy land to play by the rules. But going to the States changed my attitude. I can get that lot to satisfy the US’s concerns about my having ties to Canada. Now that I have satisfied my Canadian bucket list, I wouldn’t mind going back to the same place every year for four or five months to work without worrying about paying rent or overstaying my welcome.

Having traveled the breadth of this country, I knew that the only provinces where it made sense to buy land were Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Every other province is too expensive and too restrictive, with rules governing how long the lot can stay empty and forbidding turning them into RV pads.

Manitoba’s real estate prices have jumped 158% over the last six years. Saskatchewan is ripe for a comparable boost as it now boasts the only truly affordable acreages along the US border. The word on Bay Street is that now is the time for savvy investors to buy Saskatchewan property and that that investment will pay for itself shortly, just as those who were wise to buy in Manitoba a few years ago have made good on their investments.

So that’s why I decided to meander through the Saskatchewan countryside yesterday. I was checking out several possible pieces of property.

Today, I drove back out to Assiniboia to make a formal offer on the ideal piece of land and a backup offer on a slightly less suitable lot. And that’s all I have to say about that at this time.

Who doesn’t know what I’m talking about
Who’s never left home, who’s never struck out
To find a dream and a life of their own
A place in the clouds, a foundation of stone

Many precede and many will follow
A young girl’s dream no longer hollow
It takes the shape of a place out west
But what it holds for her, she hasn’t yet guessed

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Less Than Ideal Boondocking Weather

I awoke to the worst kind of weather for boondocking while relying on solar. It’s frigid and overcast. I’m still bringing in about 4A, but the furnace is taking that out just as fast. I’m trying to keep the rig around 16C and not freezing by staying wrapped in the electric blanket, which has a negligible draw.

Needless to say, I was glad to have an excuse to run back to Assiniboia (three hours round trip) this morning. I may need to go again tomorrow or Wednesday, so I am staying put. I’ll explain what’s going on in my next post.

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Hey, There’s a Walmart in Weyburn!

This morning, I headed south of Swift Current to meet up with Saskatchewan highway 13. The day was spent traversing the wide open undulating amber hills of Saskatchewan. If you’re not into that sort of thing, don’t go that way, especially in the off season as there is barely anything but land and sky for the whole route. But if, like me, you are deeply in love with prairie landscapes, I recommend this route over taking the Transcanada, especially if you’re heading south to cross into North Dakota. For one thing, the road conditions are much better!

I had thought to stop well before highway 39 to spend a few days, but the options were lacking, short of parking behind a vacant building. My GPS told me the nearest Walmarts were in Moose Jaw, which is out of my way, or Estevan, right at the border. But I was able to get online in Assiniboia (cell service in Saskatchewan is spotty) and determined that there is a Walmart in Weyburn, right at the junction of highways 13 and 39. I have permission to stay for a few nights as I may have some more business to attend to before crossing the border.

It’s been frigid and overcast all day, so my batteries are really straining. I hit a full charge about an hour ago, but if tonight is anything like last night, I will have to ration my power usage tonight. One nice little luxury is sitting in the office with the electric blanket instead of running the heat all evening.

My inverter has officially gotten on my nerves. I don’t know what’s with it, but even if I’m registering 12.6V it won’t let me do anything more than charge the laptop before squealing that I have no battery juice left and turning itself off. I know I need to get a battery capacity monitor because voltage readings alone tell me nothing, but I find it suspicious that I can run heat, the water pump, and an LED light at the same time and barely have the voltage flicker on the solar controller while my inverter is asserting that the draw from my laptop is too taxing to my system. This summer, I am going to work out the math and do the pricing on getting a battery monitor and a couple of 12V deep cycle batteries.

Now, I’m off to research inverters. 🙂

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Wagons East!

I had just switched the last load of laundry to the dryer when Jody and Gary appeared, bearing muffins! Jody usually gives me four or five in a muffin container, but this time she had two dozen fresh baked ones in a huge plastic container. I was a bit at a loss as to where to put it until the muffins were cool enough to transfer to smaller containers. Then it hit me: the oven! 😀

We said our good-byes again and then I moved Miranda onto the street so I could hook up the car. All that went fine except for one not so minor detail: my car turn signals weren’t turning on when I put on the motorhome’s. A visual inspection of the wiring revealed nothing amiss, but I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I looked closer and discovered that someone had, after several attempts, taken a serrated knife and cut the wire clean through, then carefully tucked in the pieces so that the sabotage wouldn’t be readily visible. I know who did this and he was a pain in my side all winter as he kept unplugging the motorhome when it was frigid out. I have no proof that it’s him, but he’s the only one with a grudge against me.

Anyway, I was relieved to find this type of vandalism, my first in three and a half years on the road, and not a broken window, slashed tires, graffiti, etc. I was out of electrical tape, so I ambled over to the home store a couple of blocks away and picked up a roll.

Back at the rig, I took my wire strippers and neatly snipped away the damaged portion of wire. Thankfully, I had a lot extra because he ruined over a foot of the stuff. Then, working one colour at a time, I stripped the two ends of the wire, twisted the copper together, then covered and wrapped the ends with lots of electrical tape. Once all four colours were done, I tested my repair. It worked! I then bundled all the wires together and wrapped the whole thing in a bunch more electrical tape.

The laundry finished just moments after this was done, so I did one last check and pulled away from the apartment complex. There were a number of turns to make to get out to a main road, with both sides of the street packed with cars, so it was a little bit like doing the moho slalom all over again. I needed to make a left hand turn at a T-intersection and had to wait for a car to make its on left turn onto my street. He wound up getting wedged between Miranda and a parked car and honked. I could only pull ahead so much and still be able to make my turn, but thankfully that was enough because I could tell that this person wasn’t backing up without a fight. I had just one more nasty left turn to make, and then I was on the eastbound Transcanada by 11:20 for an easy enough 400KM drive to Swift Current.

I’m glad I didn’t have to go any further today as the drive was windy and therefore exhausting. It doesn’t help that I was already sore from the last two day. I really don’t think I could have driven one more kilometre!

As I am on the road a few days earlier than planned, am finally self-sufficient for power, and am bone deep weary, I will find a place to hunker down tomorrow for a few nights before I make my border crossing attempt. This will give me a chance to see a little bit of rural southern Saskatchewan and to look a little more refreshed when I get to the border. 🙂

The rig hasn’t been plugged in since I took it out Thursday morning and I am sitting at a full charge. I love my solar panel!