The day before we were due to sell Dimes to its new owner, our oldest daughter cried. We all really loved Dimes, and while we were excited to get our new van, it was hard to let go of the van that had been a major part of our home for the last half of a year and served as our home base on countless other adventures.
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We made some decals for Wobbles and Dimes. On our test trips we noticed when other people had decals with their adventure blog URLs, it made for great conversation openers and therefore made us more likely to chat with those people. Hopefully these will inspire others to do the same, as we’d love to meet other people while we’re traveling.
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We have the van and Airstream almost fully packed for our big trip, so today I took the rig to our local Cat Scales (truck stop) to find out how much we weigh. The weight is important to know in-case we run into bridges with weight limits, but I was also concerned that we might be over our light-duty van’s capacity..
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Our GTRV camper van came fresh from Craigslist with two open cell lead acid deep cycle house batteries installed in a sealed battery box in the rear of the van (and vented to the outside). These two batteries provided roughly 100 amp-hours of capacity. In this phase of the electrical system upgrades, we’re going to replace these two batteries with lithium batteries, which will double the capacity to 200 amp-hours and reduce the weight from about 100 pounds to 60 pounds (that might not sound like much, but since we’re just about at the van’s weight capacity when we are towing Wobbles (the Airstream), every pound is important to us. We’ll also be adding a battery monitor (the same one we installed in the Airstream).
During short weekend camping trips, not having a phone or internet connection can actually be part of the pleasure of getting away from the hustle and bustle of daily life. However, for longer trips staying connected is essential for communications, navigation, planning, etc. For our travels, I researched various options (WiFi, cellular & satellite). In this post I’ll tell you what we chose and why.
When Sarah and I got married, for our honeymoon we did a 3 week road trip to many of the western national parks. We considered tent camping, but since it was our honeymoon we splurged and bought a camper van. The van was a 2001 Ford Econoline cargo van that had been lovingly converted to a camper by its former owner, a man named Vince who we met when we responded to his Craigslist ad. On the outside the van looked like a generic plain white cargo van. On the inside was a simple yet very functional camper.
