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2023 #7: Garage 90% done, ?% paid for

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Early last summer we committed to building a garage to store our Ollie. The original plan was a 3 bay garage with a center bay large enough for the Oliver, plus 2 additional bays large enough to hold our pickup truck and small car. Something like this: We wanted wood-framed instead of a steel building. We thought it would be a little better with heat/cold, and easier to modify in the future. Not to mention a little more residential-looking. Then we started getting prices. That 3 bay garage was going to be too much for our budget, and probably for our yard as well, so we scaled back to a 2 and a half bay garage to house the trailer, truck, and some work/storage space. Most of the work would be done by friends who were contractors, including the excavation/site prep, framing/roofing/siding, and electrical. We wanted to give work to people we know and we hoped to save a little money in exchange for a longer construction timeframe, since some of them would be working on this as a side job.
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2023 #6: End of season

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We wrapped up our 2023 season with our usual trip to Aces High campground in East Lyme, CT. We've been going there for many years (since they opened, actually). It's a nice place with large, level, full-hookup pull-through sites. It's close to home and a convenient place to give the tanks a good flushing before winterizing. It's usually an older, more mellow crowd there, too, and we enjoy that. Lately, they've been making improvements to the property. They're experimenting with paved pads and they've got a sauna going in. That's all good, but the price has been climbing, too. As we approach retirement, we're going to Aces less and less. It's becoming hard to justify when holiday weekends are $125 a night. Not sure if we'll return in the spring, but we'll probably still go next fall to start winterizing. Maybe just not on holiday weekends. We'll see. Before Aces, we went up to Central New York to visit our son and new daughter-in-law.
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2023 #5: Crazy summer

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What a crazy summer! We had a lot going on. Steph has gone 1 year cancer-free on her first-line treatment. Our son got married. We're about to retire. We've got major construction at our house. And, we've camped. A lot. First things first. Steph was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer last summer, 12 years after her initial cancer diagnosis and treatments. We are very happy to report that the current treatment has been successful so far, with no evidence of disease on her most current scans. On top of that, she felt well enough to get out and enjoy this past summer. We certainly made the best of it. As I posted earlier, we started camping right after school got out in June (we're both teachers) with a week dry-camping at Hammonasset State Park. We had a nice corner site in the woods overlooking the tidal marsh. A week later we returned to "Hammo" in a different site - this one in an open field - for 2 more weeks.  In July, our son married Katherine, the lo
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2023 #4: Stretching the Tanks

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We returned to one of our favorite places, Hammonassett State Park, for our longest run of dry camping yet. Hammonassett has lots of decent bathhouses in the campground. We always try to book a site close to one of them. The question was, how long could we stretch our black and grey tanks before we had to dump? The plan was to use the bathhouses as much as possible, saving our black tank for mostly middle-of-the-night liquid deposits, and only showering in the trailer rarely. We booked 12 nights but Steph had to return to our house on 2 of those days because of severe weather and doctor appointments. We never dumped. When we left the campground on the 13th day our tank readings were: Black 69%, Grey 75%, and Fresh 25%. Based on this, I think we can go a max of 15-16 days before having to dump in this situation.  There were definitely compromises we had to make. We either used the campground showers or used medical body cleansing wipes we found on Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod
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2023 #3: One Year In and a Lithium Challenge

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Happy Fourth of July! We just spent a week (6 nights/7 days) camping in full shade on mostly rainy/cloudy days. We were at one of our favorite oceanside campgrounds in Connecticut and we scored a site in a wooded section next to the tidal marsh. The clouds and 2 huge trees overhead mostly took our solar panels out of the picture. Mostly. More about that later.  We figured this would be a good test of our Lithium Platinum Package with its 640 AH batteries. We left home fully charged and used the fridge on 12v power for the hour drive to the beach. Since it was cloudy, that used 4% of our charge before we even set up camp. We proceeded to dry-camp for the week pretty much the way we had with our other trailers. We ran the fridge on propane, pumped water from our tank, used minimum interior lighting, and remembered to turn off lights we weren't using. In the end, that wasn't really necessary. Unlike our other trailers, we also ran the inverter to make coffee and run the microwave.
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