A little test trip to St. Joseph Peninsula State Park

Scout it taking off this morning.  Destination...St. Joseph Peninsula State Park.  This is a wonderful Florida State Park, located in the panhandle region.  It has miles of sugar white sand beaches.  More to follow...

Well I am updating this about 3 weeks later.  And I am trying to figure out how to use Flickr with Blogger.

Well as you can see below, I figured it out.

Of the three nights that we spent at St. Joseph Peninsula, only one night had great sunsets.  The photos are below.

The No-See-ums were thick again this year and quite vicious at dusk and dawn.

Other highlights of this outing...having lunch at the Hole in the Wall Bar at Appilachicola.  They shucked the oysters in front of me and took them into the kitchen, and fried them.  Can not get any fresher oysters than that.

We stopped at the Bay of St. Joe Buffer Zone.

  http://www.dep.state.fl.us/coastal/sites/stjoseph_buffer/

The curator explained a lot about the bay to me.  She also told me that during scallop season which runs July 1-September 10 only the bay is perfect for gathering bay scallops.  She said that it was like an easter egg hunt looking for bay scallops in the sea grass.  She advised that the best time to go is after the kids are back in school.  So...the first week in September looks good to me.

Lunch on day two was at the boat docks in Port St. Joe.  We stopped at the Piggly Wiggly, purchased a pound of shrimp.  The store steamed them for free.  We went to a picnic area overlooking the bay and dined on our still warm shrimp.

The Diesel Hydronic heat worked fine...so that issue seems to be behind us for now....

John Holod

I have been a big fan of John Holod's RV videos for several years.  You can see his collection at www.rvadventurevideos.com

I was poking around on you tube and found a very short video of his best secret for RV travel in Alaska.  You can see it here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou2fwXrHomk&noredirect=1

Basically John, is saying that you catch the Alaska Marine Highway back from Haines to Prince Rupert.  More on this will follow in future blogs.

I sent John an email asking him about the necessity of reservations.  Within about 2 hours I had a great reply from him.  I followed this up with a phone conversation which added even more color.

That has helped a lot with setting the itinerary more firmly in my mind.

A big shout of thanks to John for your help with this....

The shelf in the hanging locker project

Scout came with a small hanging locker by the bed.  We do not take hanging clothes when we are out.  In the bottom of the locker we keep our toaster oven.  Scout has a microwave but no conventional oven, so we carry a toaster oven for the likes of bagels, toast, pizza, baked potatoes, etc.

There is a shelf above the space that we keep the toaster oven.  and it is tall.  It was designed for hanging clothes.  It also contains a 110v outlet that is connected to our inverter.  This project is to add space and provide for a place to charge phones while driving, or camping.  While driving, we can run the inverter off of the Diesel motors alternator.  The Mercedes Sprinter came equipped with a 220amp alternator.  This is enough to run our refrigerator on AC from the inverter and power the phones while not reducing the batteries charge.  When dry camping we can also run the inverter.  We have 220 amp hours of battery capacity, so we have a fair amount of backup power at our disposal.

Here is what the hanging locker looked like before.

See the space above the toaster oven.  Here is how much space that locker uses....

Down  at the bottom of the locker to the right of the tape measures bottom, is the 110 outlet.

I crafted a template for the shelf from cardboard.  The locker is kind of a one sided trapezoid and the outside wall bends in.  The result is the farther up we go, the smaller the shelf becomes.  Another consideration is that the documents on the left side of the locker provide the weight limitations of the Mercedes Sprinter and should be accessible and not be removed.  So we had to work within those constraints.  The ultimate goal was to provide a place for dry clean towels, clothes that have been worn, but are not dirty and will be worn again, as well as provide a secure place to charge phones, tablets, laptops, etc.

Here is the shelf in place.  You can see the outlet on the left.

And here is the finished product.

I added a couple of bins to hold the phones.  These are held in place by velcro.  I am not really that happy with those, they may be replaced.  The light that you see is a Mighty Brite reading lamp powered by 2 aaa batteries.  That may or may not stay.  I am pleased with the fit of the Belkin usb charger/ac outlet/surge protector.  The shelf is unfinished plywood.  That may or may not get stained and varnished depending upon how ambitious I become :)

Cell Phone Charging

We have been charging our cell phones, kindles, and tablets using two Amazon USB power modules attached to a power strip.  The cord is plugged into an outlet above our galley counter with the power strip component resting in our window sill.  While heading down the road, we turn on the inverter and power the phones.  The major problem with this, is where the phones reside they make it difficult to close that window shade.

With the new shelf project coming along, it seemed like a good idea to move the phone charging station into the wardrobe.  The wardrobe has a 110v outlet in it.  Rather than using the amazon power modules, I located a combination surge protector 110v and usb power strip by Belkin.  I was concerned that the Belkin unit would draw power when plugged in.  I took out our Kill-a-watt meter and tested this.  The Belkin draws NO power when a device is not attached.  The Amazon modules draw .3 watts each for a combined of .6 watts.

It seems like the Belkin is the way to go, so the next step is to engineer that into the shelf project.

Above left to right are the Kill-a-watt meter, the Amazon Power module and the Belking usb/110v power strip surge protector.

the photo below shows the power strip that we currently use to charge the phones.

As you can see it gets the job done, but blocks the window.  As part of the shelf project on the next blog, I will address this as well, as adding a shelf to enhance storage space.

The Big One B.O.

For quite a while now, we have been thinking about taking Scout to Alaska.  The trip is a go for next summer.

Many years ago, I read the book "Airborne" by William F. Buckley.  It covers the planning preparation and trip across the Atlantic in his 60 foot Schooner Cyrano.  When communicating to the members of the voyage, they referred to it as the Big One or B.O.

From now going forward the Alaska Trip will be called the BO, in deference to WFB.

The orientation of this blog will now be redirected to cover the planning and ultimately execution of this journey.  In the past, we have used this more as a travel log of our trips in Scout.  This will cover more about Scout, prep for the journey, planning for routes and destinations and trial runs around the area to try out new modifications and equipment.

What we know about the trip so far:

This will be an extensive undertaking.  Leaving from Tampa Bay and heading to Anchorage and back will cover around 11,000 miles.  That is without adding a lot in for side trips.  At this point we plan on leaving in mid-June and returning sometime in mid to late August.

So that having been said.... we have two mods/fixes to Scout.  First, we have had trouble on and off with our Espar Diesel Hydronic heating system.  This provides our heat and hot water.  It runs off of the Diesel fuel in our main tank.  The promise of a system like this, is whisper quite heating and instant on hot water.  We have not had a huge need for this while running around Florida, due to the abundance of natural heat :) and camp showers.  As we prepare for more boondockng in cooler climates, this will be a necessity.

A few weeks ago, we took the Coach to RV World of Lakeland to have the system looked at.  They found that the main holding tank for liquid used to transfer the heat was empty.  We do not know why, but they filled it and the system seems to work.  We will be testing this extensively over the cool weather trips this winter.

The second modification is to add a shelf to our small armoir in the back of the van.  This cubby has one shelf and could use another.  Photos to follow.  We have measured the space and have cut a shelf to fit.  The project today is to mount that.

Next week we will take Scout out for a test run.  We will be heading to St. Joseph Peninsula, one of our favorite spots on the panhandle coast.