Freddin' It - Maiden Voyage

We’ve already done some camping in Fred.

A couple of times.

It was really bare bones though … cots and sleeping pads rolled out on the floor.

Fred, in real Fred-Time, really took its maiden voyage this weekend though.

We were in desperate need of a quiet weekend getaway. Things have been pretty hectic the past several weeks. We also had a little repair project that we needed to complete on a historic structure that was vandalized in the recent past. With Shirli’s appointment to get her second bionic knee coming up quick … and with this ideal weather … we made the best of it that we possibly could.

One of the major touches that needed to be added to Fred was the in-house power supply. We bought the 100 watt Renogy package last summer. It came with the 100 watt panel, charge controller, and the necessary cables to hook it up. Thinking about the small amount of power that we need, we settled on a 400-watt inverter to convert DC to AC, ordered a Wagan Pure Sine Wave Inverter, and it arrived Tuesday. A 122-amp hour deep cycle battery came from the automotive department at our neighborhood Walmart.

Sure.

There’s a lot of “discussion” about batteries and some batteries are “better” than others. You pay a lot more for the better ones for this purpose and even more for the best ones. If we get a couple years out of this battery, I figure it will have been well worth the price we paid. I feel reasonably certain that it will last at least that long. I had really good service from one with less amp-hour capacity that I used with my electric trolling motor. I bought that battery in ’07 and it still holds a charge.

This solar thing?

It’s really an interesting concept. I’ve read about it for decades and have always thought it was an idea that makes good sense. It took some smart folks to figure out how to convert light to electricity. The neat thing about solar is that I don’t have to understand how those components do what they do. It’s enough to know that they do and it doesn’t take a library of knowledge to hook up a small system that will accomplish all that you need for it to accomplish. Red to red and black to black end to end.

Plug your AC thing into the inverter and voobaa. The dang thing works.

One of the primary things about it has to do with the inverter.

Modified sine wave or pure sine wave?

All that I’ve read and listened to insists that powering sensitive electronic devices is best accomplished using pure sine wave. A pure sine wave inverter costs more than a modified sine wave inverter but the additional cost is well worth it when considering the cost of replacing sensitive electronic devices that are ruined by using modified sine wave. Delicate circuitry doesn’t like the rough edges of the modified sine wave.

We didn’t do the whole solar thing this weekend. 

The panel stayed home. 

I put the battery on the charger to insure that it was fully charged and we used it with the inverter all weekend to charge our electronic devices and power Shirli’s CPAP. We don’t have a meter to monitor the battery yet so there’s no way to know for sure how many amps we pulled from the battery. A little simple arithmetic could figure it out though. The inverter has a built in protection system that will shut it down if the power supply to it is low. It never shut down.

Having good clean AC on board without parking by an AC outlet was a real treat!

It’s been a couple of years since we last did an easy camp. That was with one of our modern tents. We’ve done quite a lot of outdoor stuff though. Quite a lot of the stuff has been teaching outdoor skills to youth and a few adults. We’ve done quite a lot of open-fire cast iron cooking. But to just go and honestly smooth it after a modern fashion? Cook on a propane burner and sleep on a real bed? It’s been a while. Too long a while. That was the last time we pulled our vintage Sprite camper up to Little River State Park.

With our Where’s Fred Now? direction taking shape and fast coming together … with Fred equipped as it is at this point … we needed a good weekend for a test run to see what tweaks are needed and to enjoy what we have accomplished so far in getting Fred ready to roll out for this long FRED adventure that’s been in the thinking and planning stages for so long now.

Our good friend Beau and his sidekick Trooper pulled in Friday evening and spiked camp for the weekend. Saturday morning we did the repair work … a little paying it forward project … on a gazebo built by the CCC during the Dirty Thirties. Saturday afternoon we were joined by one of the founding members of the Alabama Hiking Trail Society and talked about the trails and trail work at the Little River State Park and elsewhere in Alabama. That was quite informative. There was even a fortuitous meeting with the local Scout Troop and the opportunity to introduce them to a representative of the Trail Society. 

A lot of good can potentially develop where that sort of working relationship is concerned.

It was a great weekend Freddin’ it.

Now for a little tweaking and then get on down the road.

One Step Closer

This is not an all of a sudden thing.

No. Not hardly. Far, far from it!

What we have going on here are some last steps being taken to realize the fulfillment of something we have been dreaming about, planning, and working toward for quite a long time.

What we have going on here is a definite personal statement regarding life and lifestyle choices in an age where too many others … some of them well-intentioned … some of them players in the scheme of things that Orwell wrote about … work hard to keep us inside some corral that defines their own agendas and comfort zones and denies our own.

It’s about attaining and exercising levels of personal freedom and independence unknown by most and dreamt of by only a pitiful few. It’s about living life rather than life living us while we yet have life to live.

We, the two of us involved in this living adventure, have always been free spirits.

We have both experienced some pretty hard knocks walking the road of life. The two of us have, as well, known and yielded to the rigors, commitments, and compromises involved as parents rearing little ones and eventually letting go of them once they arrived at the point where they thought their wings were strong enough to carry them.

We’ve made all the normal rites of passage except the final passage. We have no control over the time and place where it finds us. What we do have control over is what we will do with ourselves between now and then as long as we have the health and will within us.

It has been a struggle … a real fight … to get to this point in our adventure.

There has been a tremendous amount of detaching and letting go … a lot of Golden Calves evaluated and tossed into the flames ... a lot of priorities examined and adjusted ... a lot of establishing boundaries and perimeters. Careful. Calculated. Meticulous. Avoiding knee-jerk reactions that hamstring objectives.

Most of the people in our concentric circles that we initially told about our plan looked at us like we had developed some sort of deformity. A few of them … well-intentioned of course … seemed to undertake some sort of personal ministry to pull us out of the depths of our despair and heal our ugly deformities. Others simply wrote us off and ceased to have anything to do with us since we no longer fit into their life schemes. A few look at what we are doing, wish they could do what we are doing, but are still wearing fetters that secure them to their own choices.

This is a dream that we began exploring and planning quite soon after we signed the mortgage papers on this house twelve years ago. We considered a lot of options and alternatives that would compliment the inherent nature of free spirited people. We did a lot of reading and studying on the subject. There are options and alternatives that had to be waded through … something of a sifting process … to finally arrive at the best solution to satisfy our needs.

Was signing those papers the right thing to do? It seemed so. It was socially correct and provided a roof over our heads. It also quickly became a stark realization that we were fettered to something that controlled us to the Nth degree, kept our noses to the grindstone laboring for the man, kept us greasing the gears of the social and economic machinery, kept us playing the game, and kept us from living from the heart with spontaneity and creativity.

Signing those papers kept our bodies within the realm of humans doing when everything in our hearts … everything in our spirits … wanted the freedom to live as humans being.

There are a lot of how-to guides on how to build a bed in a van. We looked at a lot of them. Some of them are complicated contraptions. When it came time to do the bed build I simply figured a little material list to build something solid that would accommodate the queen sized mattress. I’m not going to go into detail on the construction in this blog. I did post an album of pictures on my FB page that gives something of a little step by step detail on the construction. The actual building of it can be accomplished in good day if you want to bow up and get after it. I split that good day up over two days and went about it more casually.

We are just a few more steps away from doing some roaming and wandering.

Two interesting words.

Roam and wander.

Roamers and wanderers are given a bad rap when you take the dictionary definitions at face value. Those definitions apply bad connotations to folks like us. The definitions make it sound like our roaming and wandering is purposeless.

Bunk.

Poppycock.

Roaming and wandering is replete with assorted levels of purpose and experience.

Freedom ..... Spontaneity ….. Creativity ..... Watching sunrises and sunsets ….. Unencumbered ….. Unrushed ….. Unharried ….. Babbling brooks ….. Starlit skies ….. Snowcapped mountain ranges ….. Sights galore …. No uninvited and unwelcomed drama and bullshittery ….. Rubber Tramp Rendezvous' ….. Owning time rather than time owning us …..

Just to name a few.

Yes.

This is PURPOSE. This is purposeful roaming and wandering.