appliances

We were going grocery shopping a lot, but it still felt like we never had anything to eat. So Brad had an idea to convert our tiny fridge into a freezer (it’s designed to go either way). Now we are fully stocked with food that lasts a lot longer. Even in a tiny freezer we can fit frozen meats, tamales, veggies, fruit and grated cheese. We’ve started using frozen garlic and ginger that come in little ice cube trays. And we keep herbs like cilantro that don’t keep long fresh in there too. We have so many more options now than we did before. It can all go from frozen to fully cooked and delicious in a short time with the Instant Pot, which has turned into one of the most useful appliances for bus life! Sure, I miss fresh food a lot, but at least now we don’t have to go grocery shopping every day. Keeping ourselves safe and well fed under quarantine.

Ok, so the box is huge, but the actual product is teeny tiny! I thought all espresso makers were too big for bus life, but we lucked out with the Nespresso Essenza Mini. It’s 3” wide, 12” deep. Now we can have delicious coffee any time the mood strikes, which I’ll be frank, is often… Hooray, coffee!

I am having so much fun with this! Double bubbles for me.

Something awesome about being in the Seattle area – ordering from Amazon Prime in the morning and having your items delivered that afternoon. For free, of course. I could get used to this.

So we spied a SodaStream inside the Lucky Bus at the Bus Fair and found out we are not the only sparkly water addicts living in a bus. The addiction is real. Living full time in a bus does not make it easy to maintain the addiction when you have to deal with can storage and recycling. So we pulled the trigger and got one (an Aarke instead of SodaStream). This thing is amazing, and ain’t she pretty too? Also, just learned that raspberry cucumber is an amazing flavor combination.

What’s to be done with the hot summer sun? We are roasting in the bus already, and in its current location that can’t be helped. After this weekend we’ll park under some lovely shade trees, which will cut some of the heat. But we’ve had endless energy in our battery bank, more than we ever imagined, and are using hardly any of it.

So we’ve been incrementally adding some electrical devices, and the additions are so lovely. Now we have an electric kettle to boil water so we don’t have to use the propane stove top. I love it, it boils water so fast! And a cheap, tiny evaporative air cooler that works remarkably well. I’m pretty sure that it’s some “As Seen On TV” product and has horrible reviews, but in this tiny space it actually works quite well.

Today we will go buy some Reflectix to make inserts for the windows and hopefully bounce away more of the sun. This, combined with new window shades for light blocking and also air flow will help a ton.

So here’s hoping we survive another blisteringly hot southern Oregon summer, this time in a tiny bus!