GANNET2 Upgrades

GANNET2 is getting prepped for surgery with electrical upgrades planned in our living quarters. 

Guará Motorhomes comes highly recommended and we have started figuring out our work order to bring our home up to date. Alessandro is expecting  we will be here till mid January so we are getting ready to dig in and learn about the capital of this country.

Rusty isn’t complaining as rainy season has brought temperatures down to the point where we don’t always need air conditioning. I saw 69 degrees yesterday after the daily downpour so I was happy too.

A former colleague of Layne’s in the Monroe County school district has taken an international teaching position here in Brasilia and offered us the use of her apartment while we get sorted out  so everything fell into place.

Getting our deposit paid for the work has been a world class hassle as we don’t have a Brazilian bank and Alessandro doesn’t take credit cards so we’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with money. Layne is much better at this than I am but even she had to admit defeat in the end and fall back on the dollar to reals cash  option our least favorite as it uses our reserves. 

This process has illustrated for us just how hard it is to run a business in one more overly bureaucratic Latin American country. We went to Alessandro’s bank to deposit cash and have them send a direct deposit to Alessandro’s supplier in Rio de Janeiro. The bank refused saying they were concerned he might be defrauding us, and him their own customer. I don’t think I’d last long as a customer of his bank.

I suppose he could be defrauding us but it’s an elaborate con as he has RVs in his shop, employees working on them and he seems to understand what he’s talking about. So far so good.

We went to Western Union to get a bank transfer from our institution in the States. Sometimes it doesn’t work out and it didn’t work out for us so finally we exchanged some of our dollar reserves to get the process going.

There is a bank that allows us to withdraw $500 each daily without an ATM fee so from here on we will visit Bradesco bank from time to time to stay ahead of what we owe Alessandro for the job. It’s been a ridiculous hassle but persistence pays. I’d hate to run a business in a bureaucracy like this and I can’t imagine how complicated his tax returns must be. 

I find money to be an exhausting subject and it holds very little interest for me just as long as there is enough. Fortunately my wife the former attorney is made of sterner stuff and where I enjoy the discussions about our technical requirements talking about how to transfer money sends me to sleep. Luckily I never had ambitions to become a millionaire for I would have for sure failed at that onerous task. I can’t even win at Monopoly.

The plan for GANNET2 is to reduce our dependence on 110 volt appliances, replacing our roof top air conditioner from a Coleman to a smaller dometic. Also we will be I hope converting our fridge from 110 volts to 12 volts which will reduce our use of the inverter which uses electricity to convert our 12 volt battery power to 110 volts. 

Additionally we are buying 860 watts of modern glass solar panels to replace our elderly flexible panels. That should give us a huge energy boost even on less sunny days. As we live on electricity and use no propane we have been having difficulty keeping up with our needs unless we run the engine or plug in to shore power. Hopefully these modifications will change that. 

Additionally we are getting a voltage converter installed. This will allow us to plug in to any voltage in any country without worrying whether it’s 110 or 230 volts. Until now we’ve been hauling around a manual converter for use in 220 volt countries, that starts at Peru and includes southern Brazil and all the southern countries on 220 volts. That will be one less hassle.

The one last  big electrical   modification we want is to install Starlink permanently on our roof. Having spent so much time in places with no phone signal we decided it was time to be able to connect at the flip of a switch. It does mean that  if we park under trees or in some way obscure the sky we will lose connectivity but having Starlink easily accessible and while underway will be helpful. 

JK Bridge

I know some people think there is more purity by going on vacation and unplugging but we aren’t on vacation and this is our daily life. If you are at home online you will understand why we want to be online at will in our home.

“Government for the People”

We have some other smaller carpentry jobs to do after five years on the road meanwhile the mechanic is figuring out how best to repair or replace our second alternator. We are also going to give GANNET2 a thorough mechanical check before we leave. In a way we want to put the Guyanas and all the dirt roads behind us.We had heard of a shop in Uruguay that does similar work but when we came across Alessandro we decided this is a good time to pause and spend some time here before turning to the coast and enjoy a  beach  in our home equipped to live off grid more efficiently. I can’t wait to try it all out. 

Brasilia

We arrived in Brasilia Tuesday lunchtime and drove to an RV repair shop where we are getting some work done. First of course, the  alternator is off getting looked at as I write.  

Alessandro the owner of  Guará Motorhomes is going to install a new rooftop air conditioner and new more powerful solar panels and convert our fridge to 12 volts from 110 volts. The idea is to make us more energy self sufficient. It will take a few weeks…but we have a friend from Key West who has a teaching job in Brasilia. That was a welcome surprise.

We’re staying in her apartment while we search for a place of our own while we get GANNET2 to peak livable performance. The idea is to spend January cruising the beaches of southern Brazil, something to look forward to as we struggle with all these technical decisions for our home. We want to be able to generate electricity to live off grid if not indefinitely at least for several days without worrying about energy. 

Plus we get to know this strange city built 60 years ago in a Federal District created on the whim of some politicians. The climate so far has been perfect, which is a nice change from northern incandescent equatorial Brazil and there’s no malaria here. 

Oh and by the way have you ever heard of a Ford F250 Tropical? Me neither and yet…

Who knows what we will discover as we move ahead making it up as we go along in this magical South American world.

Pirenopolis

 We decided to take a day off, swim in the pool and check out the town which it turns out is a tourist hub. You can see why.

25,000 people live in this town founded in 1727. It is a tourist hub, and we had no idea, which attracts visitors from the capital Brasilia a couple of hours away. 

It’s set in some hill country at 2500 feet and we’ve enjoyed much cooler temperatures. Finally it’s comfortable to sit out and even though it’s sweaty work we had the energy here to take a morning sitting and cleaning our home. 

Since we’ve been using GANNET2 as a car the living quarters got a bit disheveled so we pulled out the vacuum and the cleaner and got down to restoring our environment. 

We filled our water tank at the neighborhood market, we put away our clean laundry and sorted our living space. I think we both got pretty tired and disheartened in the Guyanas, the heat, the isolation and lack of overlanding amenities did get to us. I think we all three have recovered. 

Pirenopolis got its name from a group of Catalan immigrants from northern Spain who were reminded of their native Pyrenees so they named these mountains with the Latin version of the name: Pireneus and Pirenópolis is the “city of Pireneus.” 

They mined gold in the area and nowadays they farm and find gold in tourism. 

I am not a fan of cobblestones but these were odd, stones laid lengthwise  which seemed less bouncy than the traditional square cobblestones.

And of course it wasn’t so simple to get around town as there are also cobblestone speed bumps, like the gruesome surface wasn’t slowing us down enough. Better yet a number of streets, unbeknownst to Google Maps are randomly closed to vehicles as wide as the Promaster. Grr. 

The camera angle makes them look wide enough but trust me it wasn’t. We did a lot of back tracking. 

One other joy was the sharp cement speed bumps. One was brilliantly placed at the top of a hill on an intersection which got us stuck for a minute, rocking back and forth to get of the peak of the hill. That felt stupid.  

But we did get the tires rotated, as the front wheel drive GANNET2 has a tendency to wear out the fronts faster than the rears. Seven bucks and done. 

Our room at Pousada Meia Ponte (Half Bridge Guesthouse) is exceeding comfortable for $70 a night. Plus we have the whole place to ourselves, including a massive breakfast spread which saves us having lunch.

Rusty spent the whole day napping. And when I say “napping” I mean he fell into a  profound sleep. 

And just like at home on Cudjoe Key Rusty loves to sleep on gravel. Sometimes I think we haul his bed around to make us feel better. 

When we bought the bed we took him into Pet Smart and I pulled down any bed that looked large enough for him. Hr inspected them

and the one he settled in we bought. He does use it but he is quite happy on cold tile, a rug, or gravel. 

Cold air conditioning and strong WiFi and…

…secure courtyard parking for the beast of this journey: