A Rainy Sunday in the Jungle

We woke up to rain on Sunday morning, and spent the day relaxing in the camper and getting inside stuff done. Even though we’ve had so much gorgeous weather since we’ve been here, we still feel like we MUST be out in the sunshine when it’s nice. After 25 years in upstate NY, we’re so conditioned to take advantage of every nice day, that we both find it almost impossible to work inside in the good weather. So, a rainy day is a good thing for us as far as getting things done, not to mention it helps the trees and plants grow and keeps the dust down in the road.

Tom hooked up washing machine, which meant he had to go up and down the ladder and on the metal roof that was slick from the rain in order to hook the water supply hose to the tank. He ran a PVC pipe from the drain hose into the jungle, and we figured that all we had to do was fire up the generator, plug it in, and that would be that. Well, we figured that, but knew it probably wouldn’t happen that way since nothing is that easy, and everything we start to do seems to require 10 steps we haven’t considered before we can start the intended task. We finally got water running from the roof tank hard enough to fill the washer and make it run, then had to reset the breaker on the generator. We figure this is something we are going to have to get used to when we run large appliances. Because the water pressure isn’t great the water runs pretty slowly into the washer, and we have to watch it to make sure it runs through every cycle correctly, but it sure beats washing clothes at the river on rocks or on scrub boards with a hose in the backyard, or paying a ridiculous amount of money to get the clothes washed and then having to deal with a basketful of damp clothes.

Tom also setup electric inverter, finally, after getting all the extra parts he needed to put it together. None of the instructions listed the extra parts required, so he had to start the job, figure out what was needed, then wait until a Spanish Lookout trip to get them. We can now use internet without the generator running, provided the battery connected to the inverter is charged. This isn’t quite as easy as it sounds, since we can only charge the batteries through the camper connection, so getting both deep cycle batteries charged involves swapping them out on the camper. It’s a little tricky, but it works.

We also used the rainy morning to sit with our tea and have a planning session for what we anticipate our week will look like. We are getting a bit more reasonable and realistic with our goals now that we are getting the hang of how long some things take if you need supplies. We THINK we have all the supplies for the week, so it should go smoothly – we are keeping our fingers crossed. And, we have to go to Belmopan on Wednesday to get our passports stamped since we are almost through our second month in Belize, so if we find we need some supplies by mid-week, we’ll be out anyway.