Each Friday, I post some relevant (and not-so-relevant) stats about the trip, as well as a little write-up of what it’s like to live out of a van for weeks on end. Here’s where we are overall:
- Total miles driven: 5188
- Total miles by ferry: 409
- Total days on the road: 52
- Total nights in a hotel: 4 (6 if you count the cabin on the ferry)
- Total miles hiked: 82.3
Here are some interesting stats for this week:
- Fuel stops: 0 (Hooray!)
- Technical issues: zero-ish (While we were on the ferry and at the hotel, our house battery ran down because we didn’t drive much or run the generator to keep it charged. Whoops.)
- National Park Service sites visited: 0 (Some lovely spots in the Tongass National Forest, though.)
Birds of Prey sighted: more bald eagles than we could count. - Seals sighted: hundreds, including lots of adorable pups
- Whales sighted: approximately 14 (mostly saw spouts a long way off so no photos)
- Bears sighted: 0
Last week, I asked you guys if you had any questions so I’d have something to write about in this week’s roundup other than our technical difficulties. So a huge thank you goes out to those of you who sent in questions. Hopefully, I’ve answered them fully here (follow up questions are welcome!).
Q: Are you still doing the simple yet delicious sounding dinners of olives, crusty bread, and fruit?
A: Yep, at least once a week we’ll do a baguette and brie-style dinner (and wine, too, of course). We’ve also done simple one-pot stuff like grilled cheese, chili, soup, or Fresh & Easy type meals that can be reheated in the microwave with one of those bagged salad kits as a side. I find the kitchen in the Sprinter just a little too cramped to do anything fancy. We also eat several meals out each week – despite all the hiking, we aren’t losing much weight on this trip!
Q: Do you watch TV (do you have time to?)
A: We have new-to-us TV shows on DVD to watch while we are on our trip. We have a set schedule that also helps us keep track of what day of the week it is, although sometimes we’ll skip a night if there’s something better to do or we’re too tired. We’re currently watching: Boardwalk Empire (Sun), The Borgias (Mon), Game of Thrones (Tues), The Wire (Wed), Justified (Thurs), Dexter (Fri) and Shameless (Sat). We each have our favorites. For instance, I think The Borgias is an intriguing historical drama about the Papacy in Rome. Whereas Kevin calls it “the Bores Ya’s”. To each his own.
Q: Do you sleep at different times than you do at home?
A: A little – we usually go to bed a little earlier than we do at home, especially when we are in quiet areas with not much nightlife. But this past week in Juneau, we’ve been going out at night (and also watching the Daily Show and Colbert Report) so we’ve been staying up later. And they don’t call Alaska “The Land of the Midnight Sun” for nothing: it stays light until 11 and the sun comes up around 3 or 4 so it’s harder to sleep in.
Q: Do you have spare gas just in case/ do you calculate where all the gas stations are along the road/ do you just trust that there will be a gas station when you need it?
A: We don’t carry spare fuel (the van runs on diesel instead of gasoline). There’s not really enough room in our small outdoor compartment, and we wouldn’t want to store it in the living space because of the fumes. We did come close to running out of fuel one time. The fuel light came on and we still had 25 miles until the next gas station, which had me freaking out. When we arrived and filled up, Kevin did the math and figured we still had a gallon and a half in the tank and probably could have gone another 30 miles. So thanks to that incident we now know that we could go more than 600 miles on a single tank (if we had to). We reset the trip odometer every time we fill up so we know how far we’ve gone/can go at any point.
Q: Do you feel the size of the Sprinter is right for this kind of trip (do you wish you had gone with something bigger/smaller)?
It’s hard not to have RV envy when we see some of the fancy Class A rigs with so much space and all the comforts of home. But those are more expensive to buy and maintain. I certainly wouldn’t want anything smaller than what we have (a Class B van). For this trip, it’s perfect. And it’s also a good conversation starter. We’ve had lots of people just come up to us in parking lots and ask us questions about it, so that’s kind of fun. If we were planning to keep an RV long-term, we’d probably want something a little bigger. Kevin thinks maybe a similarly-sized Class C with a couple of slide-outs would be nice – we’d have the same maneuverability and parkability and the slide-outs would give a little more space once we got to our campsite. A slightly larger fridge would also be a bonus (ours is really, really tiny so we find ourselves at the grocery store a little more frequently than we’d like).
Q: How often do you camp in facilities with 120v power available?
A: So far 60% of our nights have been in RV parks or campgrounds with power. Usually when we camp without power it’s at a national or state park. We have yet to boondock in a Walmart parking lot, although that would bring our cost per night down considerably). We spent nine consecutive days in Grand Teton and Yellowstone without shore power. I think we only ran the generator a couple of times to run the microwave – the batteries were kept charged because we did so much driving in those parks.
Unplugged at Meziadin Lake Provincial Park on the Stewart-Cassiar highway in BC
Q: How big is your house bank and how often do you use your propane powered generator to charge batteries?
A: Our house bank consists of one deep-cycle battery (on the boat we had six AGM batteries). We rarely use the generator because we do so much driving and usually have access to 120v every couple of days at an RV park. However, we wish we’d remembered to use it this past week while the van was sitting parked in Juneau. Between the two-day ferry ride and the hotel in town, we just didn’t drive around enough this week to keep it topped up.
Q: What are your thoughts on RV 12v systems versus marine 12v systems?
A: We spent a lot of time on the boat fretting over volts. We were sometimes at anchor for weeks at a time and it was tough to keep the battery bank topped up (even with six solar panels and a wind generator) without running the genset. On the boat our biggest battery draw was refrigeration. Now that we have seen how efficient the van’s propane refrigeration is, we wish in hindsight that our boat fridge had run on propane (it would have made our lives so much easier!). The van’s water heater also runs on propane; that would’ve been a nice feature to have on the boat too.
That being said, just having the one battery is somewhat limiting, especially if we were boondocking a lot and not driving around much. While the propane fridge and water heater are pretty efficient, the propane generator sucks down the propane like you wouldn’t believe so using it to keep the batteries topped up would mean that we’d have to refill the propane tank more often.
On the boat, we had a pretty accurate handle on the amp hours everything used. We also never let the batteries dip below 50% while we lived on the boat. The Sprinter doesn’t have a detailed battery monitor, so we don’t have a good idea of what each appliance/light/etc draws, or where our battery is at voltage-wise. Of course, on the boat we took such good care of the battery bank because it was expensive and difficult to replace it in remote islands. The battery on the van is relatively cheap and readily available so we don’t worry about it as much.
For us, on this roadtrip where we are driving pretty much every day and staying frequently in RV parks with power, the lack of 12v capacity isn’t too much of a problem. But if we were going to live aboard full-time and spend weeks at a time without plugging in, we’d probably want some extra capacity.
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