Finally, I seem to have gotten through dealing with one crisis after another and am finally settling down and enjoying myself. The storms are over. Temperatures have cooled off to something habitable. I’ve set my camp back up again. The inside of the trailer is still a bit of a mess, but I’m slowly working on that as I find the motivation to do so.
My new batteries are working wonderfully. They were still over 13 volts this morning, despite a few hours of Starlink and the fridge running overnight. (The fridge has continued to work perfectly since I reset it, so I think it was just a one-time glitch.) Even during the longest days of summer I never saw my power that high in the morning. Lithium just runs that way. While we’ve had excellent sun, I’ve also been running my generator a few hours a day to charge them up to the maximum. I’m not sure if I’m quite there even now, but I definitely have plenty of charge to work with. The next long drive I take will help, with strong alternator charging while I’m not using much power.
During a town run yesterday, I noticed a little bit of a grinding sound from my front brakes. The shop that replaced my shocks had a front brake job on their to-do list, but I skipped it to make the visit a bit less outrageously expensive, so this isn’t a complete surprise. Fortunately, this didn’t happen until I was done with long-distance driving for a while. The other reason I declined having the shop do it is that I’m perfectly capable of doing a brake job myself. I’ve already ordered some pads and will swap them out right here. The front rotors are integrated with the hubs in a weird design, so since they’re not warped or anything, I’m not going to replace those right now. I just won’t drive until the new pads are in. While I have the front wheels off anyway, I’ll take the opportunity to rotate my tires, which I’m about due for anyway.
One thing I picked up in town yesterday was my new projector. I’ve had this on my Amazon wish list for months. Last week they threw a 28% off Lightning Deal on it, so I bought it. Although it came with a screen I could string up, it works quite well against the blank side of my white trailer. I still need to figure out how to set this up for optimum viewing, as well as how to pipe sound through my Bluetooth speaker instead of the tiny one built into the projector. But we watched Yellow Wolf’s video that just got posted on Van Life Tours, as well as mine from earlier this year, which was a good proof of concept.
Life is definitely getting back to what passes for normal after a series of unfortunate events. Between my day job, ADVRider, and here, I have a lot of writing projects going on right now. The cooler weather means my brain, as well as my laptop, won’t stop working in the heat, so I can actually make some progress with them. At some point, I’ll hopefully catch up enough that I can divert some creative energy toward a book or two…
Smokey Da Van 