Days 154 & 155: Jeff Busby Campground, MS

Since it was the weekend, we ended up spending two nights at Davis Lake.  We took advantage of our day off to get the camper and van washed, and to take a look at our expenses for the past year.  Regarding the latter: in a nutshell, we spent more than we had planned.  Part of that was related to getting the van, camper and bikes optimized for living the way we are.  And part of that was about $4,000 in unexpected expenses.  Some other factors were the high cost of camping on the East Coast, some deferred maintenance that led to several unexpected bike repairs and the fact that we are driving quite a bit more than we had anticipated.  We'll likely analyze all that and decide upon some changes to keep our expenses from getting out of hand in the future.

Sunrise at Lake Davis.

Anyway, last night Alea announced that she had run out of wine, and suggested that we find some more.  I jumped into the Wayback Machine and took a look at a similar situation that took place in the exact same place last year.  We are surrounded by counties that are dry or that severely restrict alcohol sales.  Last year, that meant going nearly 100 miles out of our way to Starkville, MS (we hadn't realized that when we started our quest).  So we did some Googling and found that the nearest place to buy wine was in Shannon, a little more than 20 miles away.  But it wasn't open on Sunday.  So at 7pm on Saturday we loaded up to do some wine shopping.

But when putting everything away in preparation to leave, we noticed that the temperature on our refrigerator was 42 degrees (we have it set to 35 degrees).  That sometimes happens when the lid doesn't quite get shut all the way, but that didn't seem to be the issue this time.  And we clearly had power.  We checked the manual, and the troubleshooting chart narrowed our issue down to a possibly defective compressor.  "Great!," we thought.  But Alea suggested just turning it off and turning it back on.  I concurred, thinking these things are more like computers nowadays, and perhaps it just needed to be rebooted.  We figured we would check on it when we got back.

But when we jumped in the van, it wouldn't start.  We aren't too sure why this happened, but it may have been during the time that we spent waiting out the rain when we arrived here.  We usually have our headlights set to Auto, so they come on when the key is in the ignition.  So whether that was the problem or not we will never know.  All we knew is that the van wouldn't start.

We got in the back of the van and dug out the generator.  It comes with "jumper cables," which in actuality is a plug with two thin wire cables with which we can recharge the battery, not jump it.  Of course accessing the van's battery turned out to be a bit of a chore.  The positive terminal is up front, but the negative terminal is buried in a cramped space with perhaps 2" of vertical clearance.  So it took a while to figure out how to attach the tiny alligator clips in order to start charging the battery, but we were eventually successful.  After about 20 minutes of charging we were able to get the van started and be on our way.

Of course by then it was starting to get dark, and there is no direct route from Davis Lake to Shannon, MS.  And the street numbers on Google Maps didn't match what we were finding on the ground.  But eventually we made it there, only to find cheap wine at twice the price that we've seen it anywhere else.  But we were successful.  And when we returned to the campground, we found the refrigerator was at 35 degrees.

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The other big news of the weekend was that Alea has finally decided it is time to return to Boise to have her knee replaced.  It doesn't give her any problems when cycling, but walking has become more and more of an issue.  At first it was simply enough to avoid uneven surfaces, then distance became an issue and now she needs to walk more slowly to avoid aggravating it.

So we are tentatively planning on being in Boise in January, where we will need to find some temporary accommodations while Alea is going through the recovery and rehab.  We are hoping to be back traveling again around May or June.

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Alea rode 52 miles today (Sunday) to Jeff Busby Campground (free, water available, flush toilets).  We were the only ones here when we got here, which we had pretty much expected.  We were here last fall, and even then on a Saturday there were only a half dozen sites occupied.

Camping here will be our first real test of the solar panels that we bought back in New York.  We've used them before, though not for any appreciable length of time.  Today we may have several hours of charging time, albeit in dappled light.  The campground is heavily wooded, so we don't expect a lot from the panels, even if we spend a lot of time chasing after the sun.  We're just hoping that it can maintain the battery voltage around 12 volts until the sun goes down.  That would pretty much assure us that the refrigerator will stay cool until morning.

End of the day for Alea.

Our new solar panels.