Freedom in a Can: Adventures with Hamlet

"We travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us." - Anonymous The kind of travel that helps us capture life, is slow, unrushed, and loosely planned.  It's the kind that leads us on a side trip off our route to Alaska, so that a dude we met a few hundred miles back, who was WALKING with his dog from Tierra del Fuego, Chile to the Arctic Ocean in Prudhoe Bay, AK passed us...WALKING!  True story.  Over the past 2 months, we've been doing a lot of the other kind of travel, involving planes, hotels, baggage, work, numerous beds, and catching up with family and friends.  It's all been great, and we don't want to sound ungrateful, but between moving in and out of homes, hotel rooms, packing, unpacking and generally rushing around, it's hard not to feel like we've been on a runaway train.  If our home is where we park it, then our home, for the past several weeks, was sitting at the property of a friend in California wine country while we bounced ...

2022 - A Year of Major Milestones! Whew, what a year this has been!  It began with jaw dropping sunrises at the "House of the Sun" (Haleakala National Park) from Maui's highest summit (10,023 ft), followed by some important down time in Michigan caretaking for Hutch's octogenarian parents.  It included an 8,000 mile, 5.5  month journey from Washington to Alaska and back, coaching some friends through a major solar installation on their RV in gorgeous Bend, OR, and exploring new parts of the Great Plains, Great Basin Desert, and Pacific Northwest.   Along the way, we served as Featured Speakers at 4 RV shows across the country, and attended 2 rallies -- including our first ever vintage camper rally!  Returning to our "hometown" in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NC where we intended to spend the holidays celebrating with friends and family, Shari's parents both came down with COVID shortly before Christmas, and caused us to stretch those caretaking muscles ag...

This newsletter is chock full of all the stuff we've been up to this month -- from solar projects and winter fun to upcoming seminars and special holiday deals with our favorite brands! Latest Solar Installation Project - Erin, Jeremiah, & River Get Connected to REGO! This lifestyle of ours has the added benefit of catching up with family and friends all over the country. This November, we're parked in the driveway of our former university students, Erin & Jeremiah, who just got into RVing this summer! They purchased a gently-used 16ft Forest River, Wolf Pup travel trailer  (they named her "River") and used it to haul themselves and their two dogs as they moved across the country from Wilmington, NC to their new home in Bend, OR. Along the way, they learned the limitations of their factory installed 50W Solar Panel and 12V Lead Acid Battery. These tiny systems are really only designed to keep the 12V DC lights, bathroom fan, LP gas detector, and slide worki...

What are your Green Goals for 2023?  Whether they involve reducing your home energy bills, living lighter on the planet, or finding your off-grid happy place, digging into your solar DIY project this winter is a sure way to brighten your outlook for 2023!   For over a decade, we’ve been living and traveling with solar in our little vintage camper named Hamlet.  We’ve been lucky enough to explore all 50 states, 10 Canadian provinces, and have visited nearly every U.S. national park and more public lands than we can count…all powered  nearly 100% by solar!  We kicked off 2022 with some van camping in Hawaii, spent the summer/early fall in Alaska and northwestern Canada, and are now helping some friends in Oregon build out a new REGO solar powered system on their travel trailer.  Whatever environment brings YOU joy, Renogy solar components will power your way forward!   Have we inspired YOU to get your solar DIY groove on?  Your timing is...