Could you do life on the road?

Of course it’s all about managing the 3-P’s ….

1. Potable water
2. Poop Proper disposal of waste
3. Power

“So, what’s so hard about that?” we hear you say?  We’ll let’s see what we’ve learnt on our short journey ….

1. Potable (drinking) water

Guess there may be a small issue if we continued with our usual daily water consumption rate (220 litres!) and wanted to be off-grid longer than a day …

Surely daily 10-minute hot showers are the necessity of life? How would the Gibbies handle this challenge?

Option 1: Go the Oz road-train route … and just add a small water trailer

2. Poop Proper disposal of waste

Kaz took this shot as I headed-off to the airport with my carry-on luggage …

These nifty crapper-carts let us use the full caravan ensuite facilities – we won’t go into detail about how the “short-drop” works except to say that if you ever have one of these cartridges in your setup then do a small bit of DIY (as we did) and install a SOG.

It didn’t look like much for the price but it’s the best upgrade we’ve made to the caravan to date – chemicals no longer required and no air fresheners either (ok nuff said ????).

Sink and shower water goes into a separate 95 litre tank, which along with the cassette gets emptied at a PDS (yay acronyms – “public dump station”). These are interesting places – you get to meet fellow caravaners, have a good ole yarn and “lighten the load” too!

Our only small mishap to date happened at a Northland PDS.  

BeeGee turned a little too sharply into the dump station park and “crunched” the Ute’s taillight on the caravan’s stone-guard.  That’s one way to find out how tight we can turn!

But it’s an insignificant issue if you look at what the poor guy on the right suffered yesterday just off-shore from our DOC campsite.  We had strong easterlies when he motored past at dusk, but not quite sure what went wrong overnight. He said yesterday morning he was trying to “parallel park” – not sure I’d have much humour after that lot!

3. Power

At home few of us worry about our power demands.  In the caravan we can happily use the fridge, microwave, coffee machine, sandwich maker and other devices, but not all at the same time. We also need to be mindful if we’re heading into a few days of poor weather.  However, we’ve been off-grid for three weeks and despite numerous wet, windy and cloudy days we’ve only had one occasion to limit power use (Get off that device BeeGee!)

Constraints aren’t a bad thing – we’re getting more creative and less wasteful, but does mean paying attention to things we often take for granted.  It also usually means we should get outside more!

You think your kids are too attached to their devices – the pic on the right can often be the inside of our caravan (users are prob still in bed 😉

Anyway, enough of the burbling – here’s a couple of photos from our wanders.

Definitely not roughing it on the meal front!

Myfoodbag and Hellofresh seem reluctant to do caravan deliveries but with Kaz’s excellent database of 120+ recipes (and her MSExcel random recipe selector) we’re enjoying our “dine-in” options!  Since Kaz exports her ingredient list to google drive it’s very easy to access the “shopping list” when we’re at local markets or the supermarket, and there’s no paper lists to get lost (and yep it works even when we’re offline 🙂
Of course each time we shop we’re at a different store, so things do take longer to find, but we’re not exactly time poor at the mo.

Touches of home

A short wander northward, before we head to the South Island …

Bored passengers?