I finally created a Twitter account. Maybe I’ll be better about using that than this blog.? Blog posts just always seem to take me a long time.

In other new vacation was good and stuff. Check out the flickrs if you care for pictures. I think we took about 60gig worth of digital pics. So we’ll probably be putting up pictures for a while :)

I made a solar system for the camper. I started this really not knowing what I was doing. I got it all done and still probably don’t know much :) It’s kinda ugly, but works great. Ran the first big test yesterday and came no where near killing the battery. We ran stuff on it all day and the battery only dropped to 12.5 volts (dead is 10.5). Stuff we ran all day: stereo, mp3 player, RF transmitter, and LED christmas lights. For part of the day it was charging my phone and then I put on a table lamp with a CFL in it. I’ll post the full test at the bottom of the post. The battery is an Optima D34 deep cycle battery. That damn thing cost as much as the rest of the system put together, but it looks like it was worth it. The only thing Amongst the things that we wont be able to run are the electric space heaters, toaster oven and electric skillet. They just draw too much juice. Most of them use from 1000 to 1500 watts and I don’t have an inverter large enough to handle it. Anyway on the the pictures….

This is the battery, charge controller, inverter, and LED lights from before I installed it in the camper.

If your still interested more after the jump….
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Update: I just thought I would give ya’ll a google earth view of some of the walking we have done over the past couple days. Some of it is Metro, but most of it’s walking. This is the GPS track from our new little GPS logger toy for geotagging photos. :) If you look close you can see that some of the track is paddleboat :0

Just hanging out at the hotel tonight. We’ve been here for a few days and have a couple days left. Fun vacation, but we are so sore we can’t move anymore. I can’t remember what it’s like for my feet not to throb. We have taken about 3 billion pictures. Too busy to mess with uploading right now. So here are the few we I have uploaded….

Random Bavarian (?) man was walking across the street and we were trying to get his picture when his son (or at least someone with him) told us to stand with him and he’d take our picture. So here you go….

Jacki and I by the FDR Memorial. That is the Tidal Basin behind us and then the Jefferson Memorial.

Just finishing things up with some creepy. At the FDR Memorial is a wall covered in this kind of stuff. I have no idea why. It’s defiantly creepy tho.

I’m sure Jacki will post a good accounting of our activities at some point….

Toby having a good time killing a stick. Some cuteness for everyone’s holidays.

Well we are back home and getting the house put back together. Check out Jacki’s post here for more on that. I still have some vacation blogging to do and I’m going to try to knock out another couple posts about it today. First up is the vacation beer.

I’m going to start by saying that I had a lot of good beer. Everything I had was good. The bad part was that I only had one beer that I thought was awesome. That would be New Glarus’s Wisconsin Belgian Red. This stuff was phenomenal! We actually bought a case of it to bring home. The Raspberry Tart in this picture as good also, just not on the level with the Cherry.

Here is a shot of my beer haul for this day…

All the stuff I’ve had from Lakefront Brewery has been good. I still have some left to drink, but nothing great so far. I still haven’t gotten into the Big Sky beer. I can only drink so much. I’ll let you know when I do. I’ve wanted to try some for a while so I’m glad I found this.
More under the fold…

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Still hanging out at the same campsite. We’ve been going a lot of places and having a lot of fun. Fiber and beer and hiking and swimming the dogs. Good times. I’m going to post a couple pictures and just give a running narrative that way since I’m no where near as verbose as Jacki. Oh and I’ve geotagged almost all my pictures. So if you click on one and go to it’s flickr page then you can click the map button from there and it will put it on a map for you. :) Actually click here for a map with the pictures on it.

This is the cool bunch of signs as you come out of the campground.

This is Parnell Tower. It’s about 60 feet tall and has an amazing view. I took a couple pictures of the Sheboygan Power Plant from up there. It’s 22 miles away and one picture is with the 10x optical zoom and the other is with that and the digital zoom maxed out. Neat that you can see that far.

With 10X…

With 10X plus bunch of digital…

Click here for more tower pictures and a quick video from the top.

More under the fold (Toby swims!)….

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We made it! Camp is set up for the most part. We are at Kettle Moraine State Forest – North Unit. We are thinking about staying here for the whole two weeks. We’ll see how it goes.

Toby and Bela seem to like it ok :)

A big thanks to Carly for taking care of Ellie while we are gone. We love you!

View from the campsite….

More pictures and maybe some video if I can get it uploaded before I run out of interest. All under the fold….
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This is going to be a hell of a long post, so I’ll give a recap of the trip and then a fold. If you want to see the tons of pictures and a more detailed description, you can look under the fold for it. Also if you want to see every picture I took check here.

So I had the day off work and we decided to go get some breakfast and run around taking pictures for a while. We have been wanting to go to Cleveland and check out The West Side Market, but hadn’t had a chance when the thing was open. So it seemed like a good day to give it a shot. Jacki also remembered that there was a submarine that had been made into a museum and we thought that would be a fun thing to check out. It turned out that the sub is the USS COD. Who the hell thought that was a good name? So that was the plan. As much of a plan as we ever have for these kind of things anyway.

We grabbed breakfast and headed out. Jacki was reading the DeLorme Atlas and found that NASA had a research facility right on the way. It is supposed to have a really cool visitors center. It’s Glenn Research Center and if you’re going to go there make sure to read their SECURITY INFORMATION. And remember the ridiculous security is for YOUR PROTECTION. So we didn’t go to NASA because we didn’t feel like having our car torn apart in the search. More on that later.

Next, it was off to The West Side Market. This was pretty cool. I think Jacki had more fun here than I did. kinda weird really. I was having an off food day for whatever reason. Lots and lots of meat stands and I didn’t buy one thing.

From there it was off to find the sub. This didn’t go so well. Got a bit lost and found the Brown’s Stadium, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and The Steamship William G. Mather Museum. The only one we actually went to was the ship. We got some good pictures of the others tho.

After the ship we did find the sub, but didn’t go on it as we were out of time and needed to head home to take care of the dogs. So a good trip and more complete info and pictures under the fold….

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This is the last installment in the vacation 2007 post series. This one is mostly going to be dogs and a little bit of Jacki. Maybe. I haven’t actually figured out what I’m going to post yet so I’ll just make it up as I go along. Not like I normally have some well devised plan for my posts or something, but ……I’m not even sure where I was going with that.

Toby would like to say HI! Please come see us! KTHXBAI

Bela would also like you to come play.

Once again it’s going to be a lot of picture so here is the fold….

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Going into the fourth vacation post. Anyone sick of them yet? I’m not so deal with it :) I’m thinking I’ll do chainmaille and maybe a few random things in the post and then do mostly dogs in the next and final(?) post.

I really enjoy doing the chainmaille jewelry. I don’t seem to do it as much as I would like. Mostly because I need to get my stuff organized and start taking it to work with me again. I always seem to have plenty of spare time there.

Here is a preview of the maille goodness under the fold…

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