Wintering

Hello friends,
We have spent all of the new year in the Sonoran desert of Arizona. Quartzsite for a little over 6 weeks and now we’re outside Yuma near the Army Proving grounds on BLM land. This entire time we’ve been “off grid”....which means no electric, sewer or water! To achieve the ability to be off the grid and live for free costs quite a bit! Anything solar is pricy...then there’s batteries to choose, oh don’t forget a blue boy .... what’s a blue boy? It’s a totable, portable for hauling your grey and black water to a dump station. As for drinking water...most folks buy theirs. We’ve had a 90 watt portable solar suitcase-type set-up for several years. It works very well for us and keeps our rig up and running. This trip we added a 100 watt Goal Zero Nomad, a light, foldable solar panel which has been awesome for keeping our also new Goal Zero Yetti 400  charged. As for batteries, we have a new AGM. For now we only have room for one battery, many folks carry more. We bought a new, smaller blue boy and use a moving dolly to haul it behind our car to the dump station. We bought a Berkey Water filtering system for our drinking/cooking water and have been very pleased. 
So far we have spent $600+ for the 100 watt panel, $400+ for the Yetti, $300 for the AGM battery, $225 for the blue boy, and $200+ for the Berkey!
We paid $180 to stay at the LTVA sites in Arizona and California ....that’s Long Term Visitor Area. For that we get access to a dump station, potable water and trash bins. Good from October-April.
We will probably stay on LTVA BLM land into March hoping to recoup some of our original out-lay of funds...we also plan on staying on as much free spots as possible.
That’s WINTERING in Arizona desert regions...our way....There are other ways to winter but this is what we chose and in my next blog I’ll tell you some of the reasons why we chose this style.

TTFN,

CATHY