What Do You Do While Boondocking in the Arizona Desert | A Week In the Life of Fulltime RVers

Nothing beats this morning walk. I am thoroughly fascinated by these saguaros. Look at the base here. It looks like an oak tree. It's like hard bark. I mean if you just look at this you'd think it'd be the bottom of a regular kind of oak style tree. And then you move up and it turns into this crazy saguaro. These are just amazingly fascinating to me and I'll show you one that's decaying because on the inside of these it's also very kind of woody and stemmy that goes all the way up. Amazing landscape. Here's one that's obviously been dead and decaying for a while but it's just so weird to see these woody type spindles that go all the way up. Next to a pretty little prickly pear. Just love it out here. Barrel cactus. I think that's what it's called and I can't remember what this little bush is called but the smell on these are just something out of this world. And then these cool little joyas otherwise known as the jumping cactus and it drops these little tiny pieces of itself like that and like that. And those spikes are just amazingly sticky. They just stick right into your shoes, your clothes, your skin. Gotta be careful where you step. Just checking out the joyas. I'm gonna pick you up. Erin's on a field trip today. This is amazing out here. Yeah I've never seen you have so much fun out on our walk. Well we only got to experience this last year once for a short period when we first started boondocking. It was outside of Tucson and it was just a short, very very short time. And so now we're out here for a little bit longer and it's more peaceful, more private. Feels a lot different when you're comfortable and confident. Yeah absolutely amazing. Best part of the day? The morning walk? One of them at least. One of them. The other best parts are morning coffee. Nighttime cozy time. Workout. Workout. Every part of the day is the best part. Yeah the sun is just magical out here. It's just starting to rise. It's like 7, 7 30. Here we are home sweet home. This spot here is just unbelievable. I love it. Got the grill out last night. Gonna go on a little e-bike ride later. Here's the backyard. And it's workout time. So if people have questions on what your fitness program should look like, I will say it depends per person. It depends on what your goals are. It depends on what your current level is. Depends on what you have access to, what your schedule is. A lot goes into it. But generally speaking you should have some form of resistance training. You should have some form of cardio and just overall calorie burning. So for us we prioritize resistance training and then we sprinkle in runs. We do walks every single day. And you should also think about putting in some stretching and some mobilization work. For resistance training I recommend at least three days a week for 30 minutes per session. That is a great starting point and a great minimum to maintain. And then on top of that sprinkle in your other activities such as walking, running, biking, hiking. Whatever it is you like to do. For resistance training in the past couple of years Erin and I have tried a lot of different equipment. We first started we used adjustable dumbbells. We had the hoist brand which are awesome. They're like beefy and they kick butt and they go up to 75 pounds per dumbbell. We used those quite often, like regularly. We did end up getting a little burnt out from them once COVID hit. And I did a couple of videos on these bands which is what we ultimately seeked out as a result of COVID. So if you're interested in the bands check those out. These are a great alternative to dumbbells. Number one price alone if you're trying to get some equipment for yourself. You can get a nice kit of these for like 70 bucks or if you want to get a program with it the price goes up a little bit. But definitely check these out. You get five of them. You use all five of them. We use all five of them. You're really thankful to have all the different sets. So check that out. I do have a link and a code IRENEIRN that gets you 10% off if you are interested. They're just great because as opposed to the resistance bands that use the handles, these are the loop style that don't have the handles. Which in my opinion are a lot better because you can adjust the tension on them and you can really get a better resistance and a better tension than the ones with the handles can provide. So look into the loop style. Today I'm going to do legs and I'm going to get into my leg workout and get it over with before it gets too hot out here. So it's about five o'clock. We're on day number one or the next day. It's been a full 24 hours and I just want to do a quick electrical update and just let you guys know how our batteries are doing and of course how well we're doing boondocking. So we're just about at 75 percent 24 hours later and that's quite a bit but there's a lot of factors that go into that. But just based on that usage we're going to last four days before we need to run the generator or move spots. So thankfully we fixed our generator last summer when we were back home in Minneapolis and so we have no worries about that. But we talked a little bit about solar when we were at quartzite and it's you know early spring or late winter however you want to look at it and the sun angle just isn't that high. So we had about 530 watt hours of solar today and that's like 44 amps roughly back into the batteries which is not a whole lot of amps. Compared to last summer we were getting three times that so quite a bit difference in solar. So we're thankful to have the 400 amp hours of lithium battleborn batteries because if we didn't we would literally be able to spend a night or two here and we'd be out of power. Also we're on a bit of a warm streak so overnight it's like 50 degrees so we're really not even running the heater at all so if it was colder which I think it's projecting to be in the next few days it's going to be using even more power. But man am I so thankful to be out here. There's something about the desert, there's something about the saguaros and the chollas and just the different landscape that we're not used to and it's just so peaceful out here. There's a few bikers, walkers, hikers kind of moving by but there's only I would say maybe a dozen or so RVs in this whole kind of area here so it's very very private and I notice a lot of people are coming in for one night and then leaving. So this is definitely our type of boondocking. It's peaceful, it's quiet. We have no need to you know go out and do a whole lot of stuff. We're very very happy just walking, hiking, biking with the new e-bikes all around this type of area. It's so beautiful and so peaceful. This morning's walk was was just absolutely amazing so we're looking forward to the sunset. It's actually a little cloudy today and it's still pretty cloudy so I don't think we're gonna get a beautiful Arizona sunset but it's just an amazing amazing place. So we're gonna fire up the Blackstone. We're doing some flank steak, mushrooms. I don't know Chris is prepping some stuff inside there and that's pretty much it. We don't do a whole lot when we're boondocking. We work quite a bit. You know we started our own business in 2019 when we left on the road so that's gonna take up a lot of our time. If we don't do that it's not gonna take off so it's been doing very very well and that just requires a lot of our time so we enjoy doing that and it's not really considered work to us. It's what we want to do so we're really really happy about that and just the little things in life we're enjoying right now. Spending time with each other, sitting outside, enjoying the desert, cooking a good meal, having a glass of wine and that's about it. Sun's starting to set. Not much action out here. Just peace and quiet. A little bit of color on this side. Not much though. Well we are super excited to have these e-bikes now while we're out boondocking. This is just adding another bit of adventure to our lives. So we were in Quartzsite. We did a little bit of riding there but this is our kind of first spot more secluded and we wanted to show you guys a little bit more of the landscape out here and the road to the right goes kind of off and it's more secluded. There's nobody out there. There's maybe one or two cars that fit back that way, truck camper, and then the other way is where there's a lot more different styles of rigs. There's an Airstream we saw, some B's, some C's, motorhomes, trailers, all types of everything. And we just want to show you guys a little bit so you can kind of see and imagine if you could make it out to a spot like this as well. And we're gonna beat that three o'clock slump that's chasing us right now. That's true. We've been out here for four days now and we haven't rode the bikes yet. We've been getting a lot of work done and just really relaxing, grilling, and just soaking it up out here. It is just crazy out here. Love it. Unbelievable. So the bikes once again we cover and then I lock them up on that chain I showed you guys before and so we're just gonna hop on these bad boys and get on the road. Ready? Yeah. This is the busy side of the road and then where we're at it's a lot more quiet and secluded. We haven't been this far yet but there's gun range right over there at the base of that mountain and what a peaceful ride. The terrain's perfect for these fat bikes because it's like you definitely want the fat tires for it but it's not so bumpy that it's uncomfortable. It's a lot smoother than quartzite was. Oh way smoother than quartzite. Yeah it's much more enjoyable. Yep quartzite you couldn't go too fast without really shaking your teeth out of your head. Well that was fun. We burned over an hour. It felt like five minutes. Yeah it did. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Today's day six. We just filled up our very first trash bag. How much does that weigh? Uh it's heavy but not as heavy as we've had in the past but I'd say it's like five pounds and since I this was to the top while it was in our bin I did pull our bathroom garbage as well because that was pretty full too and I put our purple bathroom waste bag inside of this waste bag so our restroom waste is double bagged. I'm adding that this bag to this bag but in here I already had put these are trays that we had raw chicken and raw turkey in and I talk about trying to remove these trays prior to boondocking if you can like portion things out into ziplock bags or whatever because these trays just reek really bad really foul especially because they have like those pads at the bottom that collect all the poultry juice and then when I took the thighs out I trim all the fat off the thighs so I had like three pounds of just pure chicken fat in here as well so in effort to keep this smell like retained I took all three trays at the same time opened up everything so that I could pack all this up together I put three trays plus the fat trimmings in here wrapped those up in a bag double ziplock gallon bagged it then put it in this bag and then put it in here I did this about three days ago and I just took this outside to open it up in case it smelled really rancid and it does so that's our dry bag this is our second time that we've used that now and it's airtight and it's waterproof yeah so what that means for us is a success yeah it keeps all the foul rancid smells inside the bag I couldn't smell anything inside the van so this is doing a great job I brought it out here outside just in case so that when I open it up and add this in it doesn't release the smell into our small living area and I'm really glad I did because I can smell how foul it is in Colorado when we didn't have that last summer we thought there was a dead mouse in the walls yeah yeah if you've ever had a mouse a dead mouse in your house there's no other smell like it that's what a week old chicken trimming smells like while boondocking in the heat it's really gross yeah so we have plenty of space in here for you know we could easily fit another bag that size in here yeah that thing's for 10 bucks that's a major major win for uh for trash on a small van like that it is I'm really pleased with that thing and the best part is when you're not boondocking if you're in an RV park and you don't need it it collapses down into like this and you can stuff it anywhere and it's just super easy to use so bravo good pick it's my my somebody suggested that that wasn't me that was a viewer suggested that one so thank you again yes and then we also have a small stack of plates and bowls which we separate out and then we do have a big bulky recycling container so this is what six days in looks like for us and you can see separating out the bulk is critical for keeping our trash nice and tight well it's day six out here in the beautiful desert and it's sunday so chris is inside doing her client calls and i'm getting ready to pack up out here a little bit and it's been a while since we showed you guys um i think our new kind of setup that we have and so it is gci outdoors and it's called pico gear on these chairs and a viewer recommended these i can't remember the name i think it's john sorry if i butchered that but these things are pretty cool and it's a pretty sweet setup that fits in the back of our van so all we have that we can fit back there now is our c gear rug which we've had for over a year now the new blackstone which we are absolutely loving this little table here we've had for many many years we had that back in our house we had that in our camping days so this thing's been holding up for a while i think we got that from like camping world or something like that it's like the camco traditional little 20 inch table but the difference with this table is it's taller and so you can use it for like eating you see that difference there it's just much taller so the chair can kind of fit up to it but what's cool about it is it has these folding legs and so it folds up to just about the same size as the other table but it's much bigger i think this is uh 25 inches or 24 inches 25 maybe but check these chairs out i'm thinking about doing a full review on these chairs because they're almost perfect they get five out of five stars for their compactness they fold flat i'll show you in a and they're much more comfortable they sit more upright so they're not like a super lounging chair but they're definitely more comfortable than the other style chairs we had and those were those compact folded chairs which were bigger than the smaller ones they had the high back to them they folded up into a nice lightweight bag but you had to put them together every time and honestly they weren't the most comfortable because the canvas kind of squished and kind of tucked in a little bit and they weren't really like wide for your arms so these are much more comfortable i was doing a little chair shopping over the holidays trying to find the perfect setup for us while we were at the campsite there for a while and there was another chair that was more comfortable it was a little bit bigger a little bit wider and had the folding table here to the side but it didn't fold down as flat these two chairs folded flat were equal to one of those chairs uh we couldn't even fit it in the back of our van at all so these are really really great let me show you how they fold up so the back folds down and they kind of just fold like that this goes down and you push it down flat velcro and there's a bag for these things too but they stack perfectly in the back of the van one thing i do want to say they got really eaten up in quartzite with the rock and the desert these are not recommended for sand although we've had them in the desert for a while but to pull them back out you just pull them straight up go on the velcro flip it upside down and you got a nice folding chair like that so i got to give these things two thumbs up for the speed the compactness and for comfortability maybe eight out of ten they could be a little bit bigger i'm six two so i think if you're shorter they're more comfortable but um i'd prefer just a little bit taller a little bit higher of a chair maybe a little bit wider armrest but otherwise pretty cool but this is really all we carry now and over the years we've had to switch up our back especially after we did the upgrade of the electrical system if you guys remember that clam tent we had which we loved but doesn't fit in there anymore and then we've just been playing around with different chairs different tables and the grill so really that blackstone is the most flat grill that you can fit in there most grills have a cover and they're more dome shaped but what's cool now is we actually have an outdoor setup which we never had before so the grill is getting us outside more the chairs and the table allow us to eat outside we've never been able to do that before even if we started cooking outside with the blackstone we'd still go inside to eat so this just gets us outside more and that's really the whole point these vans are so comfortable to live in that when you're out in a beautiful area like this it's easy to just spend your time in there so anyways enough rambling about that i just wanted to share these products which we try to wait a little bit until we actually like the products to share them but these are working out really great we've had them for i don't know a month or two now and i'll show you what they look like in the storage in the back and that's about it we're gonna finish packing up the rest of this stuff get the bikes on the back and as soon as chris most favorite boondocking spots we've been to yet i see a trend with like similar to the national parks when we go somewhere new it's our favorite spot yet yeah well this one certainly had it all it was just it was easy access but it was very private and it wasn't really busy and it was beautiful yeah you can't beat being out in the cactuses no no this is great we made it six days um not our typical seven we're completely fine to stay another day or maybe even two we're getting pretty good at this week-long boondocking but we are ready to go we're gonna head uh into tucson and um grocery shop and do our typical errand day which is always fun time to flip our settings so we can repeat all again we have a really big adventurous week ahead that's a little bit out of our normal routine so we are excited to share that with you um so you have that to look forward to i'm keeping it a secret well one thing i wanted to talk about too was uh we ran into two people out here that were so nice and so kind that they offered to pick us up stuff at the store when they went into town yeah complete strangers yeah how cool is that after talking to somebody for just a few minutes they offer you that or somebody was actually just driving by the road but after you kind of become neighborly because you see each other you may not you're far enough away that you may never talk to them but yeah you look out for each other yeah and they see you around so people ask you know is boondocking safe how do you feel uh or do you feel safe while you're out there um that's something we're going to do a video on so if you're interested in that let us know because um it's a common question and there's a lot to it like there's it's not just like a yes or no like there's definitely some subtleties um some comfortability levels that you got to get used to but i'm ready to get on the road are you i am really excited i i mean i say it every time but i just love travel days let's do it we've been sliding since i don't remember when