Great River Bluffs State Park

Great River Bluffs Minnesota State Park

It’s located at the top of sandstone bluffs overlooking the great Mississippi river and our neighbors to the east Wisconsin. This park is filled with life and amazing overlooks. Bring your binoculars and cameras because if you don’t you’ll kick yourself.

While we didn’t camp out here we did walk through the campground and it’s pretty great.

When you enter the park you go through butterfly and meadow land and pull up to a smallish parking lot. (It’s just the first there are more further on down the hill.)

The paths are well kept and bring you through several twists and turns and (at least the one we were on) brought us to this giant vista. It overlooked the Mississippi river and the south-western bluff side of Wisconsin.

It was amazing.

Tons of bird life. Being on the Mississippi I wouldn’t doubt that it’s on the migration route of a lot of different bird species.

You’ll see just watch the video.

Thanks for watching and stopping by.

Keep the shiny side up.

Trevor & Elissa 

Gooseberry Falls

Hello-

Today's entry is a short video about our journey to the famous Gooseberry Falls in way northern Minnesota.  We were so excited to be there that we forgot to take video shots, so this video is a smallish (under three minute) montage of our photo's.
We hope you like it.

Keep the shiny side up.
Trevor & Elissa Marty

Unboxing & We Hit the Road

Unboxing Solar Panels & Our plans for the next week.

Saturday, our solar panels arrived in the mail. They are two 100 watt panels and they’re beautiful. I am excited to put them into service for us and see the sunlight turn into energy. It feels great to start a journey into this beautiful renewable future.

Elissa and I are also announcing that we are going on our first biggie journey in ‘Woody’ the Van. Now, we aren’t going to be telling you where we are going specifically till after we’re there. Suffice it to say we will be traveling throughout the state of Minnesota and Wisconsin. The van has an appointment with the van Dr. we hope everything goes well and we are given the all clear to go on our probably 1000 mile journey.

               

Keep your ears on good buddies. We’ll be updating the instagram. Look for hashtag "Traveling with the Martys".

           

Electrical Test Run

Electrical Test Run.

It’s just like it sounds. Elissa and I go for a test ride of the electricity.

I set it up so that the control panel is in the front of the bed and we have easy access to it. The battery however is going to be mounted in the rear of the vehicle. A wire will bring the current up to the control panel. This is just a test run to see if I wired, soldered, and fused everything properly. It turns out I did. Hip Hip Hurray. This has been quite a steep learning curve. There was one minor-ish issue. I had hoped to have wired an on/off switch to the charging station. The reason for this is because I choose (accidentally I might add) a back-lit kind and the light is always on. There is no way to turn it off, so I thought if I put an on/off switch before the current it would turn the thing on and off. I did it wrong and it was always on.

****Author Shrugs his shoulders****

You'll see what I mean in the video and I’ll keep at it and get it figured out at some point.  

Well, thanks for stopping by, and be sure to keep coming back for updates on the van and other miscellany.

Have a great day gang and keep the shiny side up.

Trevor Marty

PS Next week we unfurl the bed and take it for a test run. Watch out for the mosquito's.

Van Build Electrical System

Components that I will be using for my van build electrical system.

     Today we're going to go through the parts which I will be using for the electrical system on my camper van. Now, this isn't a 'how to' blog. Nope, it's only a small outline of what I will be using for my own build.

     We’re going to start with the way I will be charging my battery, because that’s the front of the van and it seems like a terrific place to begin. I have decided to charge my battery bank (all one battery of it) two ways. One is through the alternator and the other is via solar power. Now as of the writing of this blog post I don’t have any solar so we will just be doing the alternator for the time being. The alternator charges the starting battery, the one which starts your vehicle. It is possible to split that charge and allow it (the alternator) to charge a second battery. This is what we will be doing. There are many ways to do this, but I am choosing to use a constant duty solenoid.

It is an electromagnetic switch which is turned on via a ‘keyed fuse thing’. Essentially you connect it to the starting battery and the house battery then connect it to the main fuse box. Making sure that the fuse you’re using only turns on when the key turns the car on. That way the two batteries are not connected when the car is off. They are only connected when the car is on.

The wire you use to connect the two batteries is huge. Mine is 2 gauge wire as you see in the photo.  These are the connectors which will be squished onto the ends of the wire.  

You’re also going to need a really big fuse for that part. This fuse will go under the hood, but as of the this moment I’m not entirely sure where. I think it goes after the solenoid and before the house battery. .

I’m choose to put a nice giant red on/off switch to the whole system. Here is my switch. It sure is a fancy red color isn’t it? Now we will put another one of those giant fuses. See previous photo somewhere back there. That leads to a 500 watt inverter. 

Now many boondockers will be using way way bigger ones, but we are not full time and will not be bringing fridges and things. It’s going to be there as sort of a just in case. I mean the minute you don’t think you need something is the minute you need it, so here it is. .

Here is the little dc fuse box, and fuses I will be using for the LED lights and the charging stations.

Here are the charging stations and a switch for the smaller of the two.

I’m going to wire the switch in because I noticed when I tried it before that the little blue light stays on all the time. I don’t like that. I want to be able to switch it off when it's not in use.

That’s it really. We have a small system because we don’t have many needs really. We are not full timers. We will be doing this part time till we retire and then we’ll see what happens. For the moment this will do.

Oh and here is the last piece to our electric puzzle although it’s not really electric. It’s just fun.

A CB.

Yup, because well….why not.

Have a great day gang and keep the shiny side up.

Trip to the South-West part 3

     Hey again. I just love chatting with you folks. I don't care what they say about you. You're okay in my book. In today's edition we see the final chapter of our journey to the South-west.
     On our road home we drive through New Mexico and our first stop was Pueblo, Colorado. We had the best Chinese food while there. Of course after traveling for that many hours any Chinese food would be good. The next day we drove through Colorado into Wyoming, and finally stopped in Rapid City, South Dakota. We ended up seeing a parade and had tons of fun there. Our final day was driving back home to Minnesota from Rapid City.
     We had a really wonderful time traveling through the United States and hope to do more traveling as out time permits.

     Thanks to all the folks that helped to make it possible.