December 17, 2007

Well, it finally stopped raining, but the temp dropped to well below freezing for a couple of days, so we decided to wait until the weather warmed up a bit, doesn’t sound like we are very hardy pioneers… well the reason is a very good one, our food. We have several cases full of canned food and we couldn’t afford to allow it to freeze. We are relying on this food to keep us fed through this winter, so we can’t afford to let anything happen to it.

It got above freezing each day, but it got well below freezing each night (28 F), we knew it would take at least 12 hours to travel the 500 miles we had to go, there would not have been enough time to get there and still have enough time to properly stow our food and keep it from freezing.

The last two nights, we used a portable heater to keep our food from freezing on the trailer, the food is packed in a big cage in the middle of the trailer, we wanted to take the food off the trailer and take it into the house but getting to the food meant removing too many other things off the trailer, it became painfully obvious that we had to find a way to keep the food above freezing, there was no way we were going to get everything off the trailer to get to the food. So we used heavy builder’s plastic and canvas tarps to enclose the cage, then we placed a piece of stainless steel panel inside the cage as a base, and placed a small space heater on the stainless steel panel, there was a good 3 feet of clear space between the front of the heater and the first set of boxes so it was safe. We secured the whole thing to keep cats or any other animals from getting inside, we have lots of feral cats running around here and they would have done just about anything to get inside the heated space, it worked out great, our food stayed good, and no animals got inside.

Now that the freezing weather is past, all we have to do is make sure the vehicles are ready to go, we have to wire up the VW bug’s tail lights so that while it’s being towed, it will be legal (the brake lights will come on when I brake), and tweak the trailer load. We should be leaving for the final trip either Tuesday or Wednesday. Hopefully the next post I make will be from my property.

Oh, one last thing, I can send messages from my cell phone to this blog, the problem is I don’t do the text thing very well, I can type on a regular keyboard just fine, but it takes me a bit more time and …