Roughing It Easy

As I said in yesterday’s blog, all of that time we spent dry camping over the years as fulltime RVers helped make it easier for us to get by after the power, internet, and cable TV went out in the wake of Hurricane Ian. Sure, it wasn’t the most fun we’ve had since we moved here to Florida’s Central Coast, but it wasn’t intolerable. We learned to roll with the punches a long time ago.

I have sung the praises of the Honda EU2200i generators, and after this experience I’m even more sold on them than I was before, if that’s possible. They will run for up to eight hours on a tank of gas, provided more than enough power for everything we needed, and are so quiet that we couldn’t hear them running while we were sitting in the house with the front door open, even though we could hear neighbors’ generators running half a block away.

They are also absolutely bulletproof. Years ago, we had friends who were vending at an RV rally and had their two Honda generators running outside to power the air conditioning and things in their vending at an RV rally. A big storm came through, and the area they were parked in was flooded. When they got back to their rig, the generators were underwater. They were going to throw them away, but I had a son-in-law who liked to tinker with things, so I took them instead. He poured out the gas and oil, cleaned the carburetors, and the things are still running today! You just can’t beat that kind of quality.

Even though the internet was down and telephone service was undependable once the power came back on, I found that in the evenings I could use my smartphone as a hotspot to get online long enough to update the blog for a paragraph or two, and we could also use the hotspot to watch our Sony smart TV. We couldn’t get any of the local channels, but we had no problem getting onto Hulu and Amazon Prime, and we watched several movies.

Among them was a good one called The Leisure Seeker on Hulu. It’s the story of an aging husband and wife, played by Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren, both facing health issues, who run away from home in their vintage Winnebago for one last road trip. It’s both funny and bittersweet, and if you have a chance, I suggest you watch it. Another was a silly romantic comedy called Take Me Home, about a woman fed up with her life and the rat race she’s in who hires a taxi cab to take her from New York to San Diego. A couple of the other movies we watched, Five Nights in Maine and Echo Lake, were interesting enough but left us hanging at the end, wondering why whoever produced them didn’t spend another five minutes to wrap the stories up.

Eating was no problem because we have a gas stove, and even though it needs electricity for the timer and some of its other features, Terry could light it with a stick lighter, and we never missed a meal.

We have quite a few battery-powered lights and plenty of batteries for them, so we didn’t get lost wandering around the house at night. And reading was no problem thanks to our Kindle Paperwhites. Basically, it was like camping out in a 2300-square-foot metal tent.

Would I want to do it forever? Oh, hell no! Probably the cold showers were the worst thing we had to endure. Neither one of us enjoyed them very much at all. But we came through it all in one piece, and we’re still married, so I guess it wasn’t too bad.

And finally, here’s a chuckle to start your day from the collection of funny signs we see in our travels and that our readers share with us.

Thought For The Day – Failure is a perspective. If you ask, “What did I learn?” it is no longer a failure.