Pacing Myself

Well things are happening. Sporadically. Some days I feel as though we are on top of things and other times a whole week goes by and I don’t see any progress.

Theo has been going in circles with the dam wind generator. He’s built a sample one to scale from instructions on the internet. He has cut the blades out of PVC piping, attached them to a disk which is attached to the end of a pole and there’s a motor stuck on as well. It spins like mad in the wind but it pumps out 1 amp so it’s back to the drawing board. Unfortunately his knowledge of electricity doesn’t cut it but he’s made a few trips to the helpful people at Outdoor Warehouse and he scans the internet about volts and watts and amps. It’s become clear that I won’t be able to use my hairdryer on the bus since it uses 2000W. No biggie - I’ll miss the coffee peculator much more and I’m looking forward to lots of braai’s and outdoor cooking.

I seem to be doing the paperwork and phone call side of things which I can do at work while Theo does the more hands on type of stuff.

My priority is to find a house for Kyro, our son, and his college buddies. I spend my time on the phone to estate agents and to people who are interested in buying our unwanted stuff. Evenings are filled with packing stuff which is sorted and labeled “bus” or “mom’s house” or “Kyro’s house”. No time for partying. I still haven’t found a bike for myself yet and Theo’s bike still isn’t sold.

Oh well, one day at a time.

Exposing The Truth

Once we’d made the decision to exchange our rat race lives for the unknown, we started planning things and everything just snowballed. Every waking (and sleeping) moment was about wind generators and batteries and showers and toilet dumps and water systems and battery charges and inverters and and and. We had a basic schedule/ dateline but then our landlord put a spanner in the works by giving us notice and we needed to move earlier than planned. Suddenly we were selling furniture and I made an effort to keep my cellphone charged and handy, something I was not renowned for doing.

Besides selling excess furniture and other junk, we needed to sort out accommodation for our 19 year old son at college, sell our 2 road bikes and our car and buy 2 on/off road bikes and a bus which we needed to refurbish. My brain went into overdrive. This was all supposed to be fun and exciting. Yeah right. We borrowed a huge drawing board from our friend and plotted things out with marker pens to maintain our sanity. Some days we were excited and ready to move mountains but sometimes panic set it when I realized I didn’t have a clue about alternators and I’d stress about silly things like how to pack glasses in the bus so that they don’t break when we were on the move.

Meanwhile our friends were wondering why we weren’t interested in joining them on breakfast runs or doing bike rallies anymore. It was time to break the news. My mother rolled her eyes at our plans but was quite happy to have us move in with her for a few months. Our son was exited about moving in with his college buddies and scoring our furniture. He thought our idea was cool. Our friends wanted to know what we’d been smoking, but were intrigued, especially the part about running the bus on vegetable oil.

Our secret was out and we were ecstatic.
Yeehaa.