Tag Archives: touring

Off the grid…. for a month

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What really is “off the grid?”  In some ways I feel it might be out in the wilderness with only my significant other, some rugged boots and a bowie knife.  Maybe off the grid means you live in a city without a grid pattern?  Can you just unplug power and be off the grid?

Abby and I took off one day on our trusty touring bikes to take a little tour of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.  The plan was to follow a loose schedule from Yarmouth NS around Cape Breton, round to Pictou and finish our last week touring Prince Eward Island before shipping our bikes back and catching a plane home to NYC.  We carried typical backpacking camping gear including a tiny stove and would resupply as we passed through towns.

Being that I’m a self employed photographer, as much as I love to think I can walk out of the office and leave it all behind, I end up bringing a pile of technology wherever I go.  No surprise here, I shoot digital now.  We (mostly I) had about 8Ah of lithium ion batteries between the camera (Canon 5D) media viewer/downloader, Ipod touch for checking email via WIFI (is that still off the grid?) and two cell phones.  Had we needed to charge devices along the way, we would have required a receptacle and four or five chargers, maybe a hundred foot extension cord?  How about a dynamo on a bike and then I could just ride in circles while taking pictures?  I opted for solar panels, we had a nice stable platform on the back of each bike that would be facing the sky for 120 kilometers or so a day over most of the next month.  How to make it all work?  Rather than reinvent the wheel, I found a nifty little device in Radioshack that would enable, with a little modification, us to charge most any small battery powered device with our setup.  Perhaps I’ll detail in a another post modding the Igo dual power adapter shown below.

Off Ebay, I purchased a couple of 1/3 watt 12 volt thin film (flexible) solar panels that would not only charge our stuff, but with a few bungee cords, keep our sleeping pads, food and miscellany from flying off the back of our racks.

Grubby and tired but solar & kinetic

Tresspassing at the Penn Warner Club

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Somewhere down the Delaware River in a sleepy, little (not so little) town north of Philly sits a really big landfill owned by Waste Management Corporation. The story here isn’t necessarily about them, but rather, the club.

When I was a kid, we occasionally trespassed there, swam in the coves, fished the waters, biked and made a ruckus. Why would anyone care?  It now sits next to one of the largest landfills in the region. It’s like a little campground next to a mountain of trash. Actually, it is a little private park next to a mountain of trash. Yep, private. Recently a few buddies and I rode our bikes from NYC towards Philly, and en route, detoured through a bit of the grounds on a cold winter day. A security detail ran us down and threatened us a bit to chase us off the grounds.  When I asked where we could get a day pass, he said we couldn’t as if we were hoodlums cycling from NYC in full Lycra to terrorize the grounds which were shut down for winter.

When I was a kid, before the mountain of trash came, when it was all woods between the Delaware and Tullytown, I wanted my parents to get a membership there.  It was prestigious, so I thought. My dad replied, “Why would we ever rent a seasonal campsite a mile from our house when we could go to Vermont or Canada?”

I didn’t see it. Now I do. Silly place that Penn Warner Park.