Tonight marks our fifth night in a row boondocking or dry camping. Boondocking is where you are basically camping “off the grid” without electrical or plumbing hookups. This requires you to conserve electricity and water more than you typically would in a full hookup type campground. Lucky for us, we are pretty used to this from our previous lives as sailors. I had planned ahead to be ready for boondocking as well (big shocker for those that know me, I am sure). I upgraded our batteries to have more capacity, installed 200 watts of solar panels on the roof of the Airstream, installed a battery monitoring system, and converted a Honda generator to run off the low pressure propane hookup on the Airstream. I’ll write about this more in detail later for those that want to geek out on it.
Our first night boondocking was at a farm in northern New Jersey. We belong to a club called Harvest Hosts where you pay an annual fee to be able to stay at participating wineries, breweries, and farms for free with the understanding that you will likely buy something from them. We love fresh farm food as much as we do wine and beer, so I think these places do just fine when we stay there. The farm we stayed at was beautiful as was that whole area of New Jersey with its hills and farms. When we got there, we set the Airstream up next to a corn field and walked over to the farm’s market to stock up on fresh produce and other great farm things like honey, jam, and bacon-flavored ranch dressing.
As soon as we walked back to the Airstream, it started to storm and kept it up pretty much the whole night. When it is storming, you end up having to shut all the windows and ceiling vents and wait it out. We need power hookups to have air conditioning, so that was a no-go. That may not be too bad under normal conditions but we were still in the midst of an insane heatwave stretching over the east coast. We did our best to keep cool with our small USB fans all night. Archer put four cooler ice packs from the freezer on herself to help her go to sleep – smart girl. By the time we woke up in the morning, a front that brought the rain cleared out all the heat and cool temperatures had finally arrived. Thank goodness because we still had no options for air conditioning for the next four nights. We never unhitched the trailer, so we were able to hit the road to Rhode Island early.
We arrived in Rhode Island to find beautiful weather and scenery. We stayed at a large campground called Burlingame State Park that had no utilities throughout the camp. They do have dump stations for the RV’s sewage dispersed throughout the camp and water spigots here and there (we avoided the ones near the dump stations) where you could get drinking water though. So while we are officially boondocking here, we are not far from civilization. They even have showers that you have to put quarters in – 4 minutes for 75 cents. Being cheap and unemployed and all, for my first shower, I shampooed my hair and lathered up with body wash before putting in the quarters and getting any water (this is actually pretty tough to do). I realized it only takes me 30 seconds or so to rinse off, so I got to stand there for three and a half minutes with the shower running in order to get my money’s worth. Oh well, lesson learned. We have had a great time here though. The campground is really peaceful, quiet and beautiful and there are great trails to run on. The kids have been biking their butts off here too, which is awesome.
I am loving the fact that I have monitoring systems on the Airstream for when we are boondocking like this. As I sit here typing this, I know that my fresh water tanks have 6% water left, our black (toilet) tank is 50% full, our grey (sink water) tank is 81% full, and our battery has 96% of its capacity left. I do find myself looking at the bluetooth battery and solar monitors pretty obsessively to see what they are doing though – not sure if having those is a good or bad thing. We are in a partially shaded site, so the solar panels have not kept up fully with our energy demands, but they come pretty darn close. I found that running the generator a little in the morning and then letting the solar panels work their magic throughout the day will get us fully recharged through. As a bonus, the generator allows us to run the coffee machine and Vitamix for smoothies in the morning. Now that’s camping!
We have had a great time over the past three days in Rhode Island. I wrote about our first day in Newport in the last blog post. We spent the last two days at beaches. If you have never been here, Rhode Island beaches are absolutely beautiful – sand with some random rocks for added charm and clear water with nice waves. We went to a cute town called Watch Hill yesterday and hung on East Beach in front of Taylor Swift’s house (at least one of them). Today we went to Quonny (short for Quonochontaug) Beach and hung out all day with my old friend from high school, Danny. Again, catching up with old friends we haven’t seen in what seems like forever is one of the best parts of this trip.
Overall, Rhode Island gets high scores in our book! I am pretty sure that Jamie wants to move here now. It is wicked awesome, but we have a lot of other places we will be getting so see, so we will see.
Now I know what “boondocking” really means! Wonderful adventures you’re on. Thanks for taking us along!
Very interesting! I can see how being a planner is very helpful in this adventure, especially when boondocking. I’m really enjoying your descriptions of the parts of the country you are visiting. I feel like I’m there too.
Very interesting! I can see how being a planner would be helpful, especially when boondocking. I love your descriptions of the parts of the country you are visiting. I feel like I’m there too.
I literally laughed my ass regarding the dry shampoo and body wash to save money because that’s so you and obsessing over your gauges hahaha
You tell Jaime no way! She needs to be there in January! 🤣 I am still voting for Charlottesville! 😃