Saturday, January 21, 2017

The Q.....Day 2

8:00 am, Mountain Time, Real Saturday - 43º F, 72% humidity, wind 12 mph out of the southwest......CLEAR BLUE SKIES!  

Friday we awoke to partly cloudy skies, which progressed rather quickly to heavy cloud cover, with the wind speed climbing into the 20's in advance of the forecast rain later in the afternoon.  Our battery charge was down to 87% when I first got up, and it was obvious we were not going to get much sun, if any at all, most the day so I turned on the big 7.5 kw generator to throw some electrons back into our house batteries.  If you are going to use a generator as one charging component for your batteries it is best used first thing in the morning when the batteries are at their lowest as you will get more bang for your fuel buck.  Once your batteries get over 95% the charge rate slows significantly and you are just wasting fuel.  At any rate, we ran the big generator for about and hour and got the batteries back to 90%.

We wanted to watch the Inauguration of our 45th POTUS, Donald Trump, but we also wanted to take a walk over to Tyson Wells to browse through the many vendor booths to see what deals there might be on RV related stuff, so we headed out around 9 am for the .8 mile walk over.......

The BIG TENT can be seen in the distance


......in all it took us a little over 10 minutes to make the walk.....we spent the next hour, or so browsing through one vendor booth after another......the BIG TENT does not officially open until 9 am on Saturday, so we'll return there on Saturday for sure.

Just before we left for Tyson Wells I plugged in the Predator generator to continue charging our house batteries as there was to be no sun Friday, plus we wanted to turn on our DirecTV DVR so we could record the Inauguration in case we did not get back in time for the beginning.  We located some bargains at Tyson Wells which we will revisit later in the week as the show winds down.....it always seems the prices begin to come down as the end of the RV show draws near.

We were back around 10:30 and promptly turned on the Inauguration proceedings and watched for hours......like here in Quartzite, it was overcast with rain on and off in Washington D.C......


.....as a famous man once said this peaceful transfer of power from one political party to another here in the USA is both common place and miraculous at the same time.  

As the afternoon waned, the wind became more fierce with gusts into the high 20's at times, and eventually the rain came around 5 pm.....at first just sprinkles, then almost torrential in nature, but we loved every minute of it.  As I often remark to TLE this one of the many things I cherish about this lifestyle......you are so close to nature living in a tiny house......you can feel the wind, you can certainly hear the wind, you can hear the rain on your aluminum roofing.  There is something about sitting here right now watching the sun hit our solar panels and knowing that our batteries are being recharged silently while we enjoy the peace and beauty of the Arizona desert.  We are not plugged into an electrical outlet, we do not have a hose attached to a hose bib, or a sewer line connected......we are off the grid, and completely self sufficient.........life is good!  With the use of our Predator generator we got our batteries back to 98%, which is not bad for a cloudy day.  I didn't mind running it all afternoon as we were watching the Inaugural events at the same time.

Thanks for stopping by!

1 comment:

  1. You are parked in a nice spot there handy to everything, Like you got our batteries back to about 98%, And just love this living off the grid, we do more and more every year close to 3 months in all this year checking out different places.

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