from the mouth to the headwaters!

Maybe it's a coincidence that we have moved from the mouth of the Winooski to its headwaters, close to the homestead where I was born. Maybe we are responding to subtle pressure to return to my roots, but would that mean that we will someday find ourselves camped out in Magnolia on the south side of Chicago where Andy's roots extend?! Probably all of us are pulled and pressured from various buried callings, but when you live in a house on wheels, and are not job-bound to any one geographical spot, maybe those callings have more opportunity to be acted on! I don't know.

Our intention was to spend time in more rural central Vermont, where the silence and darkness is deeper than can be found in Burlington, and to hone the skills of living more around the edges. We often live off existing infrastructure - electricity, toilet and water supply - and independence is not a guiding value, though a certain freedom is. And I want to explore the nature of that freedom, but some other time.

A huge innovation is to install a 64 watt solar panel to recharge the battery bank on the bus. We can now generate all the power we need from the sun. It is attached with a 20 ft tether so the bus can be in the shade where it is much more comfortable and the panel can be in the sun.

Friends here (we are in Cabot, Vermont) are goat farmers and also sugar makers so we are encamped under sheltering maples bounded by a rolling sea of grass - though that will change when the field is cut and that will be when the daily thunder storms of the last 2 weeks subside. The weather forecast is for continued storms through the weekend, and the haymakers are pulling their hair out!

Here are some pictures of our new site. It is only because we do not need to plug in to recharge our batteries that we can be in such a remote lovely spot. We are far enough away from a water source and the daily storms have made rain a more convenient source of water, so there is a picture of our handy water catchment system from the roof of the tent. Also we have finally set up a more convenient hand washing station. I didn't include a picture of the pooper and compost pile, but compared to the chemical toilet we were relying on at the last place, is sheer delight. Really!