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Thursday, February 25, 2016

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

18 comments:

  1. Buy a cheap multi meter To keep a check on battery state. Have a good time its been a ruff year.

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    1. It's on the list of things to buy when the check comes in. Lost two when the boat broke up.

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  2. It doesn't sound like the weather is all that great down there, but it's no better up here, so why make the drive? Enjoy yourselves.

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  3. I have to give you guys credit for soldering on and not letting this stop you from enjoying yourselves.

    Good on ya.

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    1. Life goes on. At least we have some cool campfire stories.

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  4. just monitor the battery voltage. make sure it does not drop below 12.1 volts on the car. Then you should be able to still start the car.

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    1. The solar panel should have no difficulty keeping the charge up, but monitoring it is important.

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  5. New day, new plan, but still going forward. Sounds good to me ~

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  6. Yep, it is way too early to go back to the cold north woods. You may want to stick it out down there in Florida for a little while longer.

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    1. It will be a lot easier to reopen the house if the weather is nice. One year I went back too early. It had been a harsh winter and even my water supply line was frozen. Last year it was much easier to get everything up and running.

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  7. The mud on my shoes tells me it's really not that frozen up here. Happy to see you in a month or so. <3

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  8. Believe it or not, some fierce thunderstorms blew through the North Woods around 3am today. Temps in the 50's all day. I don't know where winter is, but it's not here.

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    1. It could hiding in the month of March. Remember all those years we had late winter snowstorms?

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  9. saw 2 flocks of robins 2 day. the first ones. they came too early, snow and 35 mph winds. [north east ohio],

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    1. It's been a season of weird weather. My lovely wife and I had near misses with 5 tornadoes this winter. That's unusual, even for us.

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