And This Too Shall Pass

Or, Another Benefit of Boondocking

The past four and a half hours have been interesting. At 9AM the power went out. In a house dependent on water pumped from a well, that also means the water supply is out. While our modem was still on UPS we still had internet, so we attempted a call to our electricity supplier but all phone lines were busy. We left a voice mail then proceeded to cook breakfast on our gas range. After breakfast we decided to drive the five miles to the nearest convenience store. We wanted to pick up a couple of gallons of drinking water but even more than that we wanted to see if we could find a fallen tree or other indication of the source of the outage. At the store the cashier said she’d learned that the outage was widespread and that it was at a “box” belonging to the power generating company from which our supplier buys our electricity. That they were working on it was reassuring but Steve’s professional instincts kicked in. He figured that if a substation transformer had blown, that the outage would last at least a few hours but possibly days. We decided to prepare for the “days” possibility. We moved our Honda eu2000i generator from the bed of the truck to under the kitchen window, moved the refrigerator out a few inches, threaded an extension cord through the window and plugged the refrigerator into it. Then we ran the refrigerator on generator for an hour and a half. Meanwhile we brought the stovetop coffee maker and filters in from the T@B. We also retrieved our Rugged Geek RG2000 from the truck to use to charge devices. We started talking about how we’d spend the evening, perhaps out on the deck until after dark, or retreating to the T@B if we needed lights. We couldn’t get in touch with our neighbors because phones are internet and are electricity dependent in our mountainside neighborhood. When we were happy with the status of our refrigerator, we loaded the Honda back into the truck and were preparing to head up the mountain to see if our neighbors needed an electric boost when the power came back on. Hooray! We’re back in touch with the neighbors and with them agree that it’s nice to be back to “normal”. Somehow we trusted that “This too shall pass.” But the two of us are grateful to have had the opportunity to do a run through and now to evaluate how we can prepare even better for the next time. So grateful for our boondocking equipment and knowhow.