Week Two Boondocking, Did We Improve? | Fulltime RV Living

Welcome back to another Sunday video. I'm Kris. And I'm Aaron. And in this video, we are going to continue our Operation One Week Boondocking and give you guys an update. So in last week's video, we talked about our pain points in boondocking, and we got a ton of great comments. I think this is a very good subject that a lot of people are very passionate about. We got some very, very good and long comments on people sharing their tips and tricks. Passionate and curious. Yes, absolutely. So we are on our second week of boondocking. We are in a different location, still outside of Tucson, Arizona. And this week is quite a bit different than last week. And without really doing any major changes, we've already improved quite a bit. So before we get into the review of how we're doing so far, I just wanted to also say in this video, we are going to do our travel errand day. So we're gonna hit up the gym, the grocery store, the dump, the laundromat, and what else? I want to go to the Sally Beauty Supply Store. But so we should say that when you're boondocking, in a van specifically, we try to just always stay anchored down. We don't like to pick up and leave because, number one, the access road here is very bumpy. So even though it's only like a mile and a half long, it takes a really long time at one mile per hour to get in and out. Yeah, it's bad. We'll show you some clips of that. Secondly, when you pick up and leave in a van, you don't have anything like a trailer to leave behind and hold your spot. So if you're leaving, we bring everything with us and we are prepared for anything. So we try to time all of our events and errands for one day, such as today. So we're pretty much out of food. Our tanks are very full. Our laundry, we haven't done laundry for over two weeks. So like everything is just starting to kind of scrape by. And really the big dictator for what day we leave is our tanks because that we like to stretch out as long as possible. Everything else, we can kind of time it to work well with that day. But let's start talking about actually how well we did this week. Speaking of the tanks. We did great. We did so much better. And the big driving factor was just being able to go outside more frequently. Yeah, so it is Friday morning. We got in Saturday night. So we lasted almost seven days. Let's say six days, we lasted our black tank and our fresh tank and gray tank are both about empty and full also. So just by switching a different location where we're able to go to the bathroom outside a little bit during the day, that stretches our tanks out to about six days. So much better than the three, four days. But like we said before, we are looking to get a full week of internal capacity so that if we have no sun, no ability to use outside restrooms, we're able to be off grid for up to one week. That's going to be the goal for our rig. And like I said, we got a lot of great comments and some interesting things to check into. On the electrical side, our batteries lasted about three days before we had to run the generator. And that was without doing any video editing or much laptop work for me. So that lasted longer than it normally would. But once we hit that point of having to charge them, it seemed like night after night we had to run the generator. So we ran it for about an hour or two and without running it for three or four or five or six hours to completely fill the batteries. You just don't get a full charge off of them. So we're still researching options on increasing our capacity. And then on the trash, an interesting thing came up. Somebody in the comments said something called a crusher with a K and it's a manual compacting garbage can, which I thought was very interesting. So that's kind of something cool to look into. And basically, it's a garbage can that compacts the garbage as you go. So you're supposed to get multiple times the capacity of a normal garbage can. Yeah. In this case, this week, we did really, really well on trash because we have so many neighbors here that have trucks and they're going into town every day for whatever reason. So they're doing trash runs. Yeah. And we've been really lucky because they'll come grab a couple bags from us here and a couple bags from us there. And just that on its own is like a huge relief for us. So that's kind of a, I don't want to say we cheated this week, but if we were on our own, we would be swimming in some trash bags right now. Oh yeah. Yeah. We're nowhere near where we need to be. I just wanted to point out the fact that after like doing something for two weeks, you get so much better at it. So practice definitely helps. And you just find ways to improve upon and improve upon and improve upon your previous results. So it's going well. On the fresh water, it's just about empty. It's not quite empty, but it's very, very close. And we only took one shower in between. So we waited three days, took a shower, and then we're headed first stop to the gym. So we'll work out and we'll have a nice full shower there. But water is still a big issue to have. We would like to shower every other day, I think would be a good compromise. We don't have to shower every single day, but every other would be nice. Every other would be just great. Nothing wrong with that. No. So that is a quick update on how we're doing so far this week. And now we're going to battle the treacherous road out of this place. And we'll bring you guys along with. After the grocery store, Chris is going to show a quick little bit about how she packs the fridge and does some of the organization there. So we had a few people asking about that. So we'll show that too. All right, so let's get going. There is the free RV dump. But first stop, Planet Fitness straight ahead. So that is our first stop on a long list today of many stops. So it is going to be one of those days that is probably going to take us eight hours. It's exhausting just thinking about it really. Yes, but we're excited about Planet Fitness for sure. So we are going to go get our swole on. Right, Chris? That's right. We're going to put some work in. And get ready for the day. So here we go. Man, do we love the gym. That is the highlight of our travel days or our city days when we get out and get to the gym. It's already 1.30. But as usual, yeah, it's just the day gets away super quick. And we usually spend like an hour and a half in the gym. And then we just had breakfast at one. We spend like an hour and a half working out. And then we shower and get ready. So it's a couple hours in there. Yeah, it takes some time. It really does. So we drove the 0.1 miles across the parking lot to the grocery store. Yeah. Chris is going to check out fries. I'm going to check out fries, going to do some grocery shopping. And we just had breakfast. And we ran out of fresh water while we were cooking. So there's like a sink full of dirty dishes right now. We did pretty good on the water then. I'd say we timed that about right. This little area right next to Rail X Ranch is really nice. It's got just about everything, including that free dump that we're going to hit up soon. But we want to get back before dark. And Chris is going to take you into the grocery store a little bit and see what's in there. So normally we would wait until the very end to dump our tanks and fill up fresh water. But since we're on such a time crunch, we're going to split up. And despite what Chris says, that she does all the driving, I drive once in a while too. So I'm going to head across the parking lot to the dump station and we're going to go dump the tanks. So decided to do propane while we're here, getting the tanks dumped and the fresh water filled. And that's another kind of tough part about boondocking is we have to run our generator and the heat. So all that's done off of propane. So in the past week we used nine gallons of propane. So that was about 30 bucks. It's around three dollars a gallon here in Arizona. And if we were boondocking for an entire month straight, that's going to cost us $120. That adds up quick. So that's kind of some of the things we're trying to figure out. Really running the generator at night is a huge consumption source. I think our generator does half a gallon per hour. So if you run it for two hours, that's a gallon of fuel. So that could be three bucks a night, not including all of the heat that's run off the propane furnace too. It is what it is. Let's keep moving and go back and pick up Chris at the grocery store. Get back here. Why? Because my cart is overflowing and I kept dropping things. I had to stop like three times to reposition myself. Oh the bubbly water. They had so many good flavors. Okay, I found so many good things in the store. You've had hit or miss with fries. You like this one? Yeah, it was one of those days where like every single thing I wanted was on sale. Awesome, well let's get this stuff inside and then we'll show everybody how you packed this bad boy up a little bit. Good. Look at all that fresh food. Yeah, it was a paradise in there. Everything was great. The grocery stores can really be hit or miss and I lucked out today. It was awesome and the produce was pretty good but what I really got lucky on was the meat. I ended up buying more meat than what I had planned on. Aaron, you're gonna not like this but this organic grass-fed 90% lean was on the manager's special because the date it says like use or freeze by like two days from now. Yeah. They normally sell this for $7.99. Guess how much it was on sale for? $2.99. Yeah, so I bought them all. I bought like six pounds so I'm just gonna cook up a couple of those tonight, put some in the freezer. What tiny room I have in the freezer but that was like my big splurge but that's a huge savings. You know, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, that's 30 bucks off. Pays for our propane that we just bought. Yeah and the reason that I went this way versus like the stuff that's at Costco is because Costco's isn't 90% lean so if I can get a good price on the leaner grass-fed I'm totally gonna do it. I also bought two of these 90% pork, 90% lean ground pork. The lean ground pork is hard to find so I got two of those. I got all this chicken, eggs. I didn't get as much eggs as I normally get because they're really expensive and I got so much other stuff but I'm gonna try to cram all this in. There are some things that some of my tips are like this coconut milk. I get the canned coconut milk instead of the big cartons because I can store these on a shelf and then one of these will last me all week and what I do with these is I just transfer it to one of these mason jars. So that's what I do to save space on my coconut milk. My big bin of lettuce. I talk about this all the time. I just reuse these Ziploc bags. So I'm going to transfer that into here, squeeze all the air out and it gets to be like half the size of this. Bananas we don't refrigerate obviously. These peppers I don't refrigerate. It says keep refrigerated but they actually get soggier in the fridge. Things like my, I have some cherry tomatoes. These I don't refrigerate and zucchini squash I won't refrigerate. So I get some vegetables that I can keep on the shelf and then if room allows I'll move it into the fridge. But things like these I will cut up while we're doing laundry. I'll come out here, take them off the core, put them in some containers so that I can make room into the fridge. So the process of getting all this into the fridge definitely takes time. Like going to the grocery store usually takes us an hour to two hours because I shop and then I have to like process all of this stuff. But you gotta set yourself up for success and it takes a little bit of time to do that. So that's about it. So that's about it. Got my broccoli chopped into here. Got my stalks separated out. You can stack it nice. My cucumber I peel, bag. All those peppers condensed down into my bags. Like I said I wash and reuse my Ziplocs so I minimize waste there. Chop off the tops of these. Anything that you can trim and chop and throw away while you're at the grocery store you definitely want to do that because then you avoid the extra garbage. So like this, get this out of here. These I'm gonna cook in lunch right away. So now I'm gonna throw it all back in there. Also I was able to stick half of this carton of eggs in my door because we have egg slots on the door. And then I just cut this in half just to cut this down because every little inch of space that you can condense makes a huge difference. And this is actually no problem for me to get all this in. I got all the meat in no problem. I always get the meat in first and then I get everything else worked out. I pull everything out and then just Tetris it in there like a champ. So I'm gonna get this in and then we're gonna take off and go over to pick up our Amazon packages because that is a gated facility that closes within an hour so we need to head there pronto. All right we just got our Amazon package. I'm super stoked. I said we haven't made any major updates yet to our project one week boondocking but this is our first. And these are adjustable low flow faucet nozzles. Faucet aerators. So I'm pretty stoked about this. It goes from half a gallon per minute to one gallon per minute to 1.5 gallons per minute. Adjustable. And I think the average faucet is like around two gallons per minute from what I saw. So half gallon just for like a maybe a trickle to wash your hands and save some water as you're washing dishes or I'm not sure but excited to get these on. So we'll get these on for next week and see how they work. Second thing we got a DC charger for the laptop that way we don't have to turn on the inverter while charging the laptop. Thank you Matt Knight, Adventurous Way. Good tip. And Diana. And then also I needed some new wireless earbuds. I've had mine for like six years. Battery lasted for about 40 minutes. So they're coming out with stuff that's so cool now that it's this has a eight hour charge on the earbuds themselves and then the case is another 40 hours. So once this is charged up that's 48 hours. So that's cool. Stoked about that. And then also Chris got a running belt which is not going to save any power or water or anything but very necessary. It charges it charges this battery. It charges her soul. That's right. So that's because my running belt broke. I used it for so long it snapped and broke and I needed a direct replacement. Yeah which you got the upgraded version which we found for 16 bucks. I think that's a good deal. Yeah. Excited about that. Jammed. Yeah but before this video gets too long we're gonna kind of throw a little curveball. We still have laundry to do and we're gonna. And lunch. It's 4 20. And lunch. We're gonna actually head to a Cracker Barrel that's 20 minutes away or towards that direction. So do laundry then Cracker Barrel because we can't pull into our boondocking spot in the dark. Yeah we could but it's advised against it. Some of the craters are pretty deep. Yeah. And when we pulled in we actually saw somebody that was in the ditch and had to get towed out by two vehicles. Yeah that's scary. Yeah but otherwise hopefully this video was somewhat entertaining. Look forward to next week where we're gonna try to find a cat scale and weigh this thing so that we can see how much extra capacity we have. Hopefully we're not over. And then we're gonna look into some options on expanding the tanks too. And if that's ridiculously expensive we're not gonna do that at all but I'm still curious about. You know maybe that's an easy option. Get a little extra room. Yeah. So still researching. Still figuring out solutions. Thank you guys so much for leaving the comments you have down below. Keep them coming. There's lots of good advice so if you're watching this read through the comments on the previous video. All types of good information going on there. So anything else you want to say dear? No thanks for watching. All right thanks guys. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you are not already and give it a thumbs up if you liked the video and we'll catch you next week.