Occupation of Independence

At long last I finally got a chance to install tire chains on somebody else's truck. This was important because I tend to be skeptical of promotional videos. Recall that this was the scheme for making my tow vehicle & trailer more capable on muddy roads. I really don't have problems on dry roads, when pulling a lightweight trailer with a rear-wheel-drive van. Tire chain installation proved to be pretty straightforward. All it takes is a bit of practice and some organization, with a foam pad and gloves. What it really takes is the self-discipline to install the chains before you slide into a muddy rut. In other words, most of the alleged negatives of tire chains are psychological and lifestyle-related, rather than real and physical. But let's back up a step and ask why this is important. Why not just be a normal American consumer and get a big expensive 4WD pickup on credit? Of course that would defeat much of my philosophy in pursuing this lifestyle. I want...

It was high time to improve the shower "stall" in my trailer. The curtain was fine, but I needed a bigger tub to stand in, and hold the water. The plastic box (tub) was simply too small. I have put up with it for four years. That seems strange doesn't it? Every time you go into a big box store you see plastic boxes of every description. It seemed obvious that if I was just patient enough I would eventually stumble onto a plastic box of the right size and shape. (24" by 24" by 10" high) Nope. How could something so simple be so frustrating?! Is it proof of the profound truth of Murphy's Law?  Believe it or not, I think Murphy's Law is over-rated. It is lazy thinking to blame things on Murphy's Law too quickly. There is a better explanation for why plastic boxes are seldom more than 18" in their smallest dimension: it is the width of most shelves in big box stores! So what else could I do? Many do-it-yourself type people are more co...

Notice to readers: to find the information that used to be in the margin of my old layout, click on the three parallel lines in the upper right of this page. ______________________________________ I did a double-take when I biked by that van this morning. The lady of the house was resting in her bed, with the van's rear doors open to the glorious morning sun. Rightly or wrongly, I tend to open conversations with mock-scolding about something that the other person is quite proud of. (On "paper" this approach would create an instant enemy. But in person, they can tell you are just funnin' them.)  In this case, the entire roof of a huge Mercedes Sprinter van was covered with solar panels. She got the joke, so we ended up with a nice conversation about their converted van. It was a marvelous piece of D-I-Y work that they deserve to be proud of.  But, several times in the conversation, a yellow light started blinking in the back of my head. I wondered how many of ...

It is easy to poke fun at ascetics. I do a bit of it myself, particularly where the 'holy man in the van' syndrome displays itself, usually ostentatiously. Therefore it will seem ironic that this post appears to strut its asceticism before the readers. Perhaps asceticism only seems ridiculous when it concerns itself with a topic that doesn't interest you, personally. Somebody who, say, gets up at 5 a.m. and runs five miles every day may laugh at people who are abstemious at the dinner table. There are many such examples. In my case, small RVs don't particularly interest me. It seems like common sense to keep a rig small-to-medium in size, and that is that. But what does interest me is avoiding heaters in a camper. There are some obvious practical reasons behind this, but I would only be fooling myself if I started running on about microscopic 'practical' justifications. The real reason is that the challenge of living without heaters inspires me. Blame my e...

What statement from his wife does a married man dread the most? You could choose worse than this one: the couple is shopping. The poor fellow is bored out of his mind, but the path of least resistance is just to humor her. There is something noble and admirable about his stoic resignation.  After awhile he finally hears what he knew was coming: "Honey, look at this. It is so cyoooooooot!" It is particularly cringe-worthy if spoken with a girlish squeal. Whereupon the wife comes running up to him, cooing and cuddling some utterly useless item that she has squandered unconscionable sums of money on. It might be the item's shape or texture, but it's probably the color. The demographic of human males who suffer in this way is fairly broad. Their suffering may be more intense and predictable if they are middle-class, from a northern European Protestant heritage. And if they do something technical for a living. This lengthy preamble was probably not really needed to e...

Wiser men than I have fallen victim to the 'previous investment trap.' That is my official excuse for taking so long to turn an imperfect -- and steadily worsening -- tow vehicle situation into a drastically better choice.  (Since I refuse to carry a mountain bike on the outside of a vehicle, my tow vehicle choices are restricted to a van or a pickup with a heavy, expensive cap on the back. I am afraid the white cargo van has become such a stereotype that it will receive prejudicial treatment from rangers.) In fact I haven't been this pleased and excited for a long time. There really is something to be said for agonizing over a problem for a long time before finally 'hitting the ball out of the park.' It adds drama to life. When I put the doggie door into the rear cargo ramp in my cargo trailer, I finally broke free of the Previous Investment Trap. I abandoned the idea of making a screen room out of the back of the trailer, and decided to see if the mountain ...

Finally I have some good news to report about my new tow vehicle.  There are so many headwinds to face, thanks to easy financing by the Federal Reserve and more restrictive regulations coming from Washington, DC.  I have complained about these trends before, so today I want to discuss this on a different level. Let's think of it as an example of problem-solving in general.  There's no point in pissing and moaning about these negative trends because I can't do anything about them, other than work around them as well as I can. Even though I have fewer options for tow vehicles compared to the past, I have more options than other campers.  Depending on how you categorize these tow vehicles, I have a half dozen options. None of them are terrible. So what is the basic approach here? So far, I have always thought myself half to death by trying to come up with one more option: one magical, exciting, new option that revolutionized the situation  -- something that...

There is a tendency to be discouraged by the noise pollution when camping in the winter. Don't be. Things are improving. Solar panels and high quality generators are becoming more common. And yet some people still buy one of those yellow P.o.S generators from China just to save $600. What fraction is that of their total rig expense? For many RVers, it is less than 1%. Hell, that's round-off error. For those who are burdened by the $600, consider the alternative I posted about in the tab "Almost Needing a Generator," at the top of the screen. Regardless of the noisiness of your neighbor's g enerator, most of its 'on- hours' would simply disappear if he put $200 into a proper "three stage" charger, such as Iota, Xantrex, Blue Sea, Samlex, etc. But instead, your neighbor simply pulls the electrical p ower cord out of the hole in the side of the RV, just as he would in an R V park, sticks an adapter on the end, and plugs i t into his g...

Long-suffering readers know that I like to poke fun -- gently I hope -- at campers who are Gandhi or Thoreau wannabees. They also know that I am not a solar purist. A rational and professional camper uses technology up to the point of diminishing returns. (Or more correctly, the point of diminishing marginal utility.) And yet there are solar purists who make it work for them. People who have vans or motorhomes probably don't count, since they can always charge their house batteries from their engine battery on a cloudy day. So let's only discuss trailers. A trailer-puller can connect their tow vehicle to the trailer, and run the engine. But that charges too slowly, perhaps 7 or 8 Amps. So what do you do when you finally admit that even Arizona is not sunny every day, and that you occasionally park under trees, or near the perpetually cloudy Coast? Buy a windmill? Never heard anything good about them. Besides, you need to supplement a solar system with a secondary system t...

Obviously the world doesn't need to see any of my photographs of the Moab area, with all the tourists running around with iPhones. Still, I like to take a few photographs on a mountain bike ride, perhaps just as an excuse to stop and enjoy certain spots. I did so here. Just then I noticed something weird happening on my face. My prescription sunglasses had just fallen apart. Actually it was just that one screw in the frame had come off. Can you believe it? With all the crap that I bring along and never use, I didn't have the little screwdriver and a couple spare screws that you need to fix eyeglasses. What if I were a rock climber and this had happened? Or a sea kayaker? Is this why 'four eyes' used to get draft deferments? At any rate I was able to mountain bike back to the van with only one lens, and the other eye closed. My three-dimensional vision was messed up, and it is surprising that I didn't goof up on the Utah slickrock. But just think. I'v...

Well, thank goodness that last post is over. It doesn't happen very often: this blogger flipping into "prophet" mode, and coming down from the mountain top with stone tablets, full of warnings and proscriptions to the Children of the Wheel. So let's just reiterate the bottom line: Counter-intuitive habit #1 = Learning to start an outing going downhill, when it makes sense. At the moment I am trying to entice a friend to come up and camp with me. She has the most perfect rig I have ever seen for hook-up-free camping, down dirt roads, on public land. And coming from me, that is worth something. It is a "Tiger." In fact, considering how illogical most people's rig-choices are, it might make sense to say that choosing a Tiger is on our official list of counter-intuitive camping habits. Let's let that stew awhile... Unfortunately I suspect that she is still a slave of "real" showers, as one gets at New Mexico's state parks. My serm...

So, can you save a fortune by converting an enclosed cargo trailer into a travel trailer, rather than buying a travel trailer from the dealer? The answer may be 'yes' if you put minimal improvements into the cargo trailer, and use it merely as a hard-walled tent for camping a few weekends per year. The answer is vaguer if you add enough to the cargo trailer to make it practical for most (non-extremist) full time RVers.  If you browse around on the internet, you will encounter low-ball estimates for how much it costs to convert an enclosed cargo trailer into a full-functional, self-contained travel trailer. There are several reasons for this: Sloppy accounting. After all, it isn't fun to save all the receipts. The mind gloms onto a couple of the big-ticket items that are easy to remember; then it is easy to claim that that is the cost of converting a cargo trailer. Nonsense! In fact you are eaten alive by a thousand-and-one small expenses. Lifestyle che...