After Seattle, we traveled south to Albany, OR, to see Nate’s sister Janine and her family. We spent our evenings with them visiting for dinner and seeing the kids. We read bedtime stories and played board games. On one occasion Janine took us to the Historic Albany Carousel. Each animal on the carousel is hand carved, and they rebuilt this 1909 mechanism to work today. It and the building surrounding it are gorgeous! You can even tour the basement where they do their carvings.
While we were there we stayed at the Knox Butte RV Park. The park was decent and clean, there were a lot of full timers living there, but it was also a busy park; when one site was vacated, it was soon occupied again.
The day before we were scheduled to depart, we drove down to Eugene, to a company called AM Solar. While we were there, we picked up many of the components that make up our upcoming Solar project. This is a big project for us, and we’re looking forward to being able to boondock and still be able to work and live fairly similarly to how we currently do when we’re plugged in.
To give an example of what’s coming, here’s an image of what’s planned just for the roof:
That’s 10 180 watt panels! 1800 watts!
We will be using Victron Energy products for the rest of the components like distributors, control panels, batteries, and inverter/chargers.
For batteries we’ll be using two of these guys to start with:
We will keep track of our progress when we start our project. Right now we’re in Boise, and our trailer is dropped off for some warranty work. When we get it back, the work begins.