A little bit of Independence

We only had to drive a few minutes from the Alabama Hills to find a much needed slice of adventure, solitude, and independence – Independence, California. The tiny little town, barely a dozen blocks long along Highway 395, had just enough in it to be cozy without being a tourist trap. An established campground waits for us within walking distance of town, but we decided to take it a step further.

Kerri’s new-found Tramping skills brought us up a road that we may have completely overlooked without. A few miles outside of town is all BLM or National Forest so we pointed Big Blue’s nose down that road and went for a little scouting adventure. Big Blue has gotten quite accustomed to traveling dirt roads in recent years, and the larger All Terrain tires make it even easier. So we take just about all the dirt roads we want in search of that next spot to call home for a few days. We scouted the first place Kerri had marked, which was just fine, but out in the open. We moved on to the next, which was just fine as well and even had some trees to camp near. We almost settled for it, but decided to check one more road only a 100 yards away… and this time the porridge was just right!

A family of leafless trees standing beside a creek not four feet wide and four inches deep – Byron’s favorite type of steam. Here we could position Big Blue right up to the creek which overlooked the small town 1500 feet below us. Surrounded by snow capped peaks we enjoyed the simple nature away from the main highway. Kerri was seduced by a tall Jefferey Pine not far away… literally ‘pining’ about it the entire time we were camped there (Ha! See what I did there?).

Normally we would not put the van – and all it’s solar panels – under a tree, but the next two days called for rain and no sun anyway so it really didn’t matter. We knew we would have to conserve our battery to survive until Friday morning where the sun was scheduled to make a return. That is two full work days, with laptops blazing, along with the fridge running 24 hours each of the days, all without any substantial incoming power. I could always crank up the big V8 engine on the van to give us a boost, but we wanted the challenge and this was the first time we could seriously test our ability to survive multiple days without sunlight on the new Lithium battery. I had some generic math in my head that said we could make it to Friday morning, but only just. We would have a 5% margin only. If I was wrong the battery would fall below 20% capacity – a number Kerri has researched as a “don’t go below” figure. In the end it turned out not to be a problem at all. By Thursday at noon we knew we were safe on the battery power. In fact, we could have gone a third day without the sun if we really needed, and we never cranked up the van’s motor at all.

Friday morning we were running out of water in our tank anyway, so we coasted down the hill, into town, and refilled our water stores at the local gas station and took up camp at the campground just outside of town. The sun made an appearance as scheduled and by the end of the work day we had our highest incoming solar day ever (1.6 kilowatts). That battery just drinks in the solar at a pace I just can not comprehend. It is amazing how much easier this thing makes life. So much so that Kerri and I both agree it takes away some of the challenge and excitement of full time van-life.

I took the time on Friday to finish up a few repairs on Big Blue; replacing a few vacuum hoses so our heater/vent ducting works properly again and rewired the driving lights back to the knob on the dash after finding the problem with those. Big Blue was back to 100% with no issues to resolve. We then strolled into town on Friday night to visit a local restaurant in celebration of a perfect week all on our own in the wild. One might think that after two full days of all four of us being trapped inside the same 90 square feet that we would have a serious case of cabin fever. Not at all as it turned out. There is ample room inside the van for each of us to have our own space. It really is amazing that two adults and two dogs can spend so much time in a space smaller than your average household bedroom and still come out alive.

A post shared by Kerri McHale🌲🌵🌊🇺🇸🇨🇦🇲🇽 (@asolojourner) on Mar 22, 2018 at 5:51pm PDT