Best Apps for getting organized

We have spent this past weekend cleaning, organizing and getting the RV packed up for our big journey.  This leads me to tonight’s post.  What are my favorite apps to get organized and streamlined for this trip.

  • Dropbox- we use it to keep copies of all of our important papers readily available.  We store things like copies of insurance cards, rabies vaccine certificates and receipts for items we are bringing with us.
  • JotNot- This is how we get copies of all those receipts into dropbox.  This is a great scanner app.  The other great feature about this is you can fax from this app for a small in app purchase.  This alone has been a priceless thing for us
  • DataVault- Great way to keep track of all those passwords!
  • IReconcile- Love this checkbook balancing app.  I have been using it for years and pay the extra for it to sync to all of my devices
  • Web Albums- Great App from Picasa- lets you access ALL your photos from your smart phone.  We have been using this for years and it’s nice to know your photos are backed up remotely but it’s also nice to access them on this app when you want to share photos of past trips with someone.  We are just about to give Apple iCloud a try, so I will let you know what we think of that
  • WeMo-  We have some remote light switch controls. This will allow us to control our lights while we are gone
  • Paprika-  Love this recipe app.  We have all our recipes on this app so we will be able to cook our favorite meals without bringing along all those cookbooks
  • Next Issue- If you haven’t tried this magazine app you should.  I pay a monthly fee and have access to every magazine I could ever want.  I have access to back issues too.  This is a great app for those traveling who want to still get copies of their favorite magazines, like Backpacker.
  • Key Ring- We have been using this app since we got smart phones.  This is a great way to keep track of all those loyalty cards (Shaws, Kroger…)
  • iBooks- We use Kindle for our books but I love the way iBooks keeps all my pdf files organized.  This is the best way I have found to keep copies of all the instruction manuals for the items we have with us.  You can find most instructions online and then download them to a pdf file and open in iBooks.  A copy of these is stored in iBooks for your future reference.  I have even created an “instruction manual” subfolder in iBooks
  • Kindle- We don’t have room to bring all our books with us.  We try to purchase travel books in kindle format whenever possible.  We have our favorite recipe books (Cake Doctor) saved in kindle.  We use our public library to borrow books in kindle format and read them on our kindles and iPads.

I hope you can all find this helpful.  We will give you an update later on our favorite travel apps, once we get to try them out.

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Expandable Ladder

Up on the Roof!

Up on the Roof!

Checking the roof of the RV is a monthly ritual for us.  We need to get up there and check around all the sky lights and make sure the sealants all look good.  Of course we will get up there more often once we get solar installed on the roof…  One of the things our RV did not come with is a ladder on the back of the RV.  This means we need to bring a ladder with us to get up to the 11+ foot roof.  That is where our expandable ladder comes in.  It collapses to around 3 feet and fits easily in the storage under the RV.  It expands and collapses in seconds.  Check it out in our YouTube Video, click here

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Going away/Pretirement Party

My co-workers gave me a very nice going away party last night.  It really warmed my heart to hear all their wonderful comments and just have some time to share stories.  They are very special people.  They went over the top in gifts with Amazon gift cards, flowers, meal.  Of course the happy trails song was “something else” and is on YouTube for all to enjoy

Thank you all so much!

Already hanging in my home. I will always cherish this.

Already hanging in my home. I will always cherish this.

and a very thoughtful picture of the ED signed by all.

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Safety first

Tires are probably the most important part of our trip as far as safety goes. We felt very strongly about installing a tire pressure monitoring system before we start our adventure. This system can monitor all of our tires, RV and are toad(towed) car.  It took us less than 1 hour to attach and sync up all of the tires. This allows us to keep track of the pressure and temperature in all 10 of our tires. The system alerts us if there is a slow or fast leak, this is very important because we might not know the toad vehicle had a flat until our next stop.

setting up the tires on the toad

Measuring all 10 tires

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YouTube Channel- 30 second video- 5 hours of work

Our Welcome video on YouTube

Today I spent 4 hours trying to set up a YouTube Channel.  Then we spent another 1-hour creating a very tacky welcome video to our new channel.  We created a 30-second video and have about 30 minutes worth of bloopers and retakes.  This is challenging my techy skills.  Follow the link above to our welcome video

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Solar Light

We recently bought a small inflatable solar powered light for those times we might not have electric hook ups.  This will be a great addition to our backpacking gear as well.  This little light has 10 LED lights that are charged from the solar panel on the top.  It puts out a huge amount of light and has 3 settings (low, high and flashing).  John has already used it to light up the small battery compartment when he hooked up the solar power.  It comes attached with a hoop so we will be able to hang it from the awning if we want some outdoor lighting when we sit outside in the evenings.

SAMSUNG CAMERA PICTURES

Look at all of that light!

Look at all of that light!

More solar!

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Gizmo’s favorite toy

Video of Gizmo chasing frisbee

One more item that Gizmo will be taking with him on his cross country trek is his shih tzu sized soft frisbee.  He tries really hard to catch this and is usually succesful one out of 10 tries.  It’s the heart he puts into that counts.  This is a great frisbee for a small dog.  Just the right size, soft, light and flexible

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Gizmo’s hiking harness

The one piece of gear that gizmo will not leave home without…his Ruffwear harness.  We ordered one the week he came to live with us and he now has 5 of them. He has multiple colors and has one larger one that fits over his winter fleece, also from Ruffwear.   A couple of the harnesses are adorned with his hiking patches.  This is the best harness we have ever used.  Gizmo has literally hiked over 400 mountains and none of his harnesses have started to show signs of wear.  They fit great and are designed with 2 straps that go under him with padding.  We can pick him up like a 6-pack if we need to boost him up or down really steep rocks.  We use the harness for walks around town too.  He is only 16 pounds and we worry about putting any pressure from a collar on his neck.

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Power from the sun!

maintaining a decent charge

It seems to be maintaining our charge pretty well

After a very early morning trip to Gilman’s Electric for 10 gauge wire and Roger’s hardware for connections we have finally attached the portable solar panel.IMG_0263 IMG_0266

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Go Power! Almost…

We have almost figured out how to attach our new 120 Watt portable solar panel from Go Power to our RV battery bank.  I have learned a lot (maybe relearned some physics) about parallel and series wiring and a combination of the two.  We have a battery bank of 4 6  volt batteries.  The instructions seemed simplistic.   Attach the first + of the bank to the last – of the bank.  The problem is the batteries are in 2 different compartments and they are oriented in different directions.  The next big complication was the distance from the positive to the negative that we had to connect was further than our cords could reach.  The other complicating factor is the + connection is almost unreachable.  Tomorrow it’s a trip to GilmanElectric in Brunswick, Maine to see if we can get an extension for the positive line to hook up to the almost  unreachable connection.  We are planning on anchoring these connections permanently as there is no way we will be trying to struggle with alligator clamps every time we want to use the panel.  FullSizeRender check out the rough sketch I created trying to figure out where to connect everything.

GP_PSK_120_low res_0

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