Moving Adventures

Today I’m in North Carolina, helping family with the move to Texas.  The finances cleared showed that having me help move was better than renting a pod or a moving truck, and I was itching for some travel, plus I’m here to help with moving things, so it all works out.

The air conditioner in my camper is being used extensively.  Initially I thought I was only going to use the camper in good weather, as that’s where I was planning on being, and an air conditioner was an optional item.  Turns out I’m really glad to have it since life doesn’t always allow the following of good weather as I had desired.  With highs in the 90’s in NC, it’s easily keeping up with whatever I want it to be set at.  This is of course thanks to the handy grid connection I have while staying here.

The fridge had a hard time keeping up during my trip here.  It wasn’t sufficiently cooling, and I had to keep increasing the thermostat, and it still just wasn’t keeping up all that well.  After turning the thermostat up to the maximum value, installing a small fan, and getting the fridge into the shade, it’s finally keeping things cool enough.  This was surprising to me since I’ve previously never had any issue with the fridge and in fact is was generally freezing things too often.  The small fan I installed is A/C powered (the only thing I had handy that would fit), so there’s a cord hanging out of the fridge.  Kind of amusing, but it gets the job done.

Before leaving on this trip, I went ahead and completed a couple plumbing projects that have been on my camper to-do list for a while.  The toilet has been replaced and I’ve re-routed the shower drain so it drains to the ground instead of into the black tank.

Having the shower drain into the black tank is a really dumb design.  The only reason the designers made it that way was because of convenience and space requirements.  The black tank is very low in the camper (below the toilet and shower), and the grey tank is up higher (just underneath the sinks).  Both the grey and black tanks are about 10 gallons each, but the fresh water tank is 30+ gallons.  Obviously this math doesn’t work out since you’d have a lot of fresh water after filling the black and grey tanks.

By changing the shower to a system that drains directly to the outside world (well, through a series of PVC pipes anyways), it avoids both tanks and really helps save on tank capacity.  And since I’m normally boondocking somewhere where a couple gallons of random water runoff isn’t even noticeable, it shouldn’t be an issue.  If it really is, I added an adapter to the end of the PVC pipe so I can hook up a hose and direct the waste water elsewhere if/when needed.

Back to the task at hand, moving.  I’m helping move just about everything from the NC house to the TX house and we’re using the trailer to accomplish that.  It’s quite amazing the amount of stuff that will fit into a 20’x8’x8′ (plus v-nose) box.  We’re somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 full at the moment, and we’re starting to run low on boxed items to add to the trailer.  I’m hoping we find enough heaving stuff to load into the back of the trailer to offset the amount we put in the front, otherwise we’ll have to re-arrange to avoid being tongue-heavy.  Both re-arraning and being tongue-heaving are not pleasant-sound prospects right now.

At this point it looks like we’ll finish loading either today or tomorrow.  I’ll be leaving the day after we finish loading, and I’m pretty sure I’ll take 3 days getting back.  I got here in 2 days, but that’s mostly because of an excessive amount of early-morning noise at my last boondocking spot.  Either way, plans for today are to continue loading as much as possible.

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