I drove into El Paso yesterday afternoon only to hang out in a Walmart parking lot for the night and restocked my supplies in the morning. I drove two blocks to a laundry that I spotted coming in to do a load of laundry while I “cleaned house” and setup all my solar panels to charge up before mid-day. Afterwords, I drove another few blocks to the local rec-center (good planning eh?) and paid $2 to go swimming which I never did. I didn’t make it past a warm shower before going back out to the van for lunch and work. My first proper shower in a week and it only cost $2… I’m good with that.<\/p>\n
I’m adapting to my power needs and capability. I nearly killed my engine-battery last night as I lean on it while the house-battery is being charged or been heavily used. The engine-battery can not take much abuse but it is quickly recharged as long as the engine starts… and it barely did that. I am considering replacing it with a marine-type battery but there are good reasons not to do this too.<\/p>\n
I’m full on food and fuel and ready to head back out of the city. The plan is to go North-East to Alamogordo which is right near White Sands National Monument. The Lincoln National Forest (home of Smokey the Bear!) is right there too so I am hoping to find a nice spot to camp for a few days. Then I head towards Las Cruces and on into Arizona with a dozen or so possible stops along the way to see and explore. If all goes well, it will be another 7-10 days before I even get into Arizona. I’ve slowed my pace to 50 miles a day, which is better. At this pace I will refuel once a week which fits into my budget OK.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I drove into El Paso yesterday afternoon only to hang out in a Walmart parking lot for the night and restocked my supplies in the morning. I drove two blocks to a laundry that I spotted coming in to do a load of laundry while I “cleaned house” and setup...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9livM-or","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.van-tramp.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.van-tramp.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.van-tramp.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.van-tramp.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.van-tramp.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.van-tramp.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.van-tramp.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.van-tramp.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.van-tramp.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}