This weekend Mike and I are going to try boondocking for the first time. So exciting! And a little scary.
Boondocking is basically camping in a motorhome. We won’t have power, water, and sewer hookups. Everything we need will be on the bus. And since we are without a tow car at the moment, everything really has to be on the bus.
So we are checking out of the RV park we’ve been staying out (we have to-we didn’t plan ahead and it’s a big holiday weekend coming up so they are already fully booked…perfect time to try out boondocking), heading out to get some supplies, and then heading southwest to visit some very cool caverns.
We will need to pick up a generator. We’ve found one at a Tractor Supply on the way that is 3500 watt and within our budget. We think that should be enough to run the basic items (fridge, laptops-Mike has a lot of writing to do this weekend for his dissertation, AC at night, etc). All we need is an adapter cable to plug the bus into the generator and we should be good to go.
We don’t have water tanks yet but we found 6 gallon water storage jugs at Walmart and will be picking up several of those. We will just carry our water on board for the weekend. We haven’t quite worked out how many we will need but we are heading towards the desert so we know we need more than we think we do. We may need to pick up one of those outdoor camping showers so that we will have something available to bathe with. I’m all for stinky but within reason.
I am the most concerned about the sewer. We don’t have black water to deal with which is awesome. We have a composting toilet instead. That we have never fully tested. We’ve been using the campground bathrooms. We had some issues with it during our test runs though and it’s not making me feel super confident that the bus won’t quickly smell like poo. We made a DIY urine diverter that connects with our drain pipes for the sinks and shower and flows out with the grey water (which technically, pee is considered grey water) because we read that it’s the mixing of pee and poo that really causes a lot of the smell issues so if you can keep them away from each it helps out significantly. Currently we have peat moss for our composting material. I really wanted a Nature’s Head composting toilet but those suckers are $900. For a toilet! And that’s cheap for a composting toilet! Ridiculous. This will be the first full, two person and regular use, test of the composting toilet. Here’s to hoping it goes well. I think the toilet deserves it’s own post regardless of how it does over the weekend.
