• Revisiting the BWCA, Minnesota’s Wilderness

    Revisiting the BWCA, Minnesota’s Wilderness

    Minnesota is home to a million-acre tract of undeveloped, protected wilderness area called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It’s located along 150 miles of the US-Canada border, adjacent to the even more-remote Quetico wilderness area in Canada. Travel is by canoe, portaging between lakes & camping in designated lakeside campsites. The BWCA is a…

  • … All Summer Long

    … All Summer Long

    The summer went fast, as it always does. Working in the locomotive shop at the railroad museum made it go way faster. The Minnesota Transportation Museum runs a tourist train on Saturdays and Sundays (the Osceola & St. Croix Valley Railway) and owns the Jackson Street Roundhouse in St. Paul Minnesota, where they maintain static…

  • I’ve Been Working on the Railroad …

    I’ve Been Working on the Railroad …

    All my live long days For a couple of weekends I’ve been working on the railroad Just to pass the time away Beause I thought it would be interesting & fun A couple weeks ago I sent an e-mail to the local railroad museum suggesting that I was interested in volunteering and wasn’t averse to…

  • Monitoring and Message Bus Redesign

    Monitoring and Message Bus Redesign

    Edit: Up-to-date description of the campervans technology stack. Warning. More nerd stuff coming up. A year ago, I started monitoring various parts of the campervan using a Raspberry Pi, ESP32 microcontrollers, and the cloud based Blynk IoT framework. A short time later I added a Nextion touchscreen display: Every Camper needs a Message Bus 😀…

  • Thoughts on the Desert Southwest

    Thoughts on the Desert Southwest

    Driving the one hundred miles of uninterrupted Mojave Desert from 29 Palms to Parker I spun up a few thoughts about the southwest. I’m a cheesehead who graduated to Minnesota, so I have no ‘born-with’ knowledge or notions about the desert. I first traveled the southwest a couple of decades ago, and at the time…

  • Tuzigoot National Monument

    Tuzigoot National Monument

    Note to self. Highway 89A from Prescott to Clarkdale is not a shortcut if you’re driving a nine-thousand pound dually campervan. The hint we missed was when Google maps said it was 20 miles and one hour to Cottonwood. And yep, it took an hour to go up and over that mountain. A bunch of…