Going Forward

My lovely wife and I are moving forward with our lives. The good news is that my home owners insurance is paying for my lost personal items. There's a $500 deductible but they didn't quibble about any of the items I listed. Apparently our insurance covers replacement cost so we are getting a chunk of change back. The check is in the mail. Thanks to people's generosity I've been able to replace enough items that the deductible is almost covered. Nice.

Where do we go from here? Camping. Between the camping gear I kept at my step-mom's and what could be salvaged, we have enough equipment for tent camping. It's going to be pretty basic. My lovely wife get's a half price discount at Federal campgrounds so they will be a priority.

Some of the places we are thinking of camping at do not have electric power. The quick and easy solution is to use a small inverter connected to the car battery. Last year while camping on the coast of Maine, that's exactly what we did. The big downside risk is that the battery can be drawn down and not have enough power to start the car.

The car has a manual transmission so it's fairly easy to roll it down a hill and jump start it. Parking on a hill was no problem at all when we were in Maine. Here in Florida . . . hills are a bit harder to come by. Fortunately the solar panel from the boat was salvaged. Amazon had a replacement charge controller on sale so that's on order. Connecting the solar panel to the car battery should be fairly easy. While Florida doesn't have many hills, sunshine is something it has in abundance.

The idea is to spend another month or so in the warm south. After that it's back to the frozen north -hopefully, a lot less frozen by the time we get there.

-Sixbears