Until last night, I planned to pull out of here on or about March 7th and head to San Antonio. Looking at the weather from Dallas and points north lately, and across the continent as a whole this year, I suspect that spring will come late this year. Even though I want to give myself plenty of time to get back to Canada, I want to delay hitting iffy weather as long as possible.

The budget is tight, as it always is, and there aren’t a lot of free places like this in Texas where you can spend an extended period of time. I found a spot in San Antonio that will cost me $5 a day, so I plan to spend two weeks there. But if I leave here on the 7th, that puts me in Austin around the 21st and I haven’t found any free places beyond Walmarts and the like in that area. I wouldn’t mind bouncing around for a few nights, but that’s no way to live long-term.

All that to say that as long as no county officials come knock on my door and tell me to move on, I’m going to spend one additional week here and leave around the 14th of March. I’ve seen some of the other boondocking opportunities along the coast and I just don’t see any point in moving. Expenses here are super low, I have a full social calendar, and the weather has been good.

Being here another week will also loosen up the budget a tad for the trip north so that I can keep traveling rather than just try to get from point A to point B while spending as little as possible.

In other words, I don’t want to move and I’m glad I have a good reason not to. 🙂

I had some trouble finding the low side port for my Ford Ranger’s AC system as it was not the super obvious one right by the compressor. Thank goodness for YouTube!

I emptied the can in while running Max AC full blast, but that did not convince the compressor to come back to life. So no toad AC for me as I have much more pressing things to spend money on. 🙁

I did succeed in using my new socket wrench set to disconnect the battery and turn off the check engine light (although I had to do it twice since 10 seconds wasn’t long enough). Here’s a tip: regularly checking the oil in your vehicle is a good idea. Forgetting to put the cap back on the oil port is not. 🙂

I woke up to a decalibrated battery monitor that claimed I was at 100% capacity and pulling in 13.0A. Both it and the solar array monitor claimed that I was at 10.5V.

My first thought? Damn, I need to do some carpentry.

I went outside and, sure enough, the batteries had shifted a little from all the wind yesterday (bad enough that I felt so queasy I went to bed at about 9PM after taking a Gravol to help me sleep!!!). The shift was enough to loosen one of the top butterfly-type nuts on the batteries. These are the ones that keep giving me grief, so I need to find a better option for them.

Anyway, the batteries were sitting at about 12.4V and a quick flick of the wrench got everything nice and tight again. I didn’t use much power yesterday and we will have sun today, so I’ll be able to recalibrate the battery monitor shortly.

After installing my new batteries in Suffolk, I restrained them the way I did my old pair, but I removed the wood when I got here to make it easier to keep tweaking the setup. I’ve now learned that it really doesn’t take much to move those heavy suckers and that they should be restrained at all times.

We’re supposed to have sun all week, so I am seriously considering taking the batteries out completely and moving the fuse and shunt to a more accessible location for checking connections. The hiccup is that I am severely limited by the length of my cables and I put the fuse and shunt where they are because there was no more obvious place to put them. So it might just be exercise for exercise’s sake, but I’ve conceded that my battery bank setup is never going work for me and will continue to cause me grief.

Anyway, not a huge deal this morning, especially since I’m very well rested. 🙂