Category: Vanlife
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The Tularosa Basin, Bosque del Apache
The Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge is famous as a wintering spot for sandhill cranes and snow geese. The refuge consists of a series of large diked ponds adjacent to the Rio Grande, flooded and drained as needed to maintain wildlife habitat. The managed flooding is intended to emulate the natural flooding of the…
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There is something about lava…
We’re back down in New Mexico, spending the night overlooking the lava field in the Valley of Fire National Recreation Area. We didn’t plan to going here – it just happened to be a cheap place to camp close to where we wanted to stop for the night. Seems like we stumbled on to a…
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Out with flooded, in with AGM
The Coachman Crossfit came with a pair of no-name 100AH flooded lead acid coach batteries. For an RV with a compressor refrigerator, the 200AH of conventional lead acid battery wasn’t really enough. If the fridge ran too often I could barely make it through the night on the OEM batteries. To help extend our off-grid…
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The Bedding Headache … solved?
One of the downsides to the layout of the Class B RV that we bought is that the lounge/dining area where you eat and relax has to be converted into a bed at night. The back of the campervan is either a combination dining/sofa/lounge or a bed, never both. The process of converting is simple…
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Campervan Mods – Hits & Misses
Like many who buy campers & RV’s, I spent quite a bit of time making the RV more usable by tweaking some of the OEM systems. Some of my tweaks worked out as expected, some did not. Mike’s mods – hits and misses: Partially resolving the power problem by adding the Lithium battery, Redarc charger…
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Coachmen & Ford Transit – Hits & Misses
Hits and misses – continued. Transit Chassis hits & misses The one-ton dually combined with the 3.7L motor worked OK. It’s not a speed demon – it’s a 270hp motor pushing a 9000lb steel box at 65 mph – and it lets you know that you are in a cargo van. But it was usable.…
Michael Janke 