With Tranquility Tour, I’m learning a lot about how to organize big events. It just so happens there’s about 20 of them, and they’re spread out over 11,000 miles…
Stay organized – I’ve been using Google Forms to keep all of the city organizers’ submissions in a single spot, and their responses to my questions dump into a single spreadsheet. I may not trust you Google, but I thank you.
Stay simple – every time there’s an instinct to make something complicated, I ask, “can we achieve the same things with a simpler format?” This keeps me sane.
Stay focused – it’s so easy to spiral into the details of each city, the route, the RV… everything. However, staying focused on the steps that need to get done now allow me to complete every step so I can be less attenuated for the details that will come later (I’m looking at you British Columbia ferry schedule! Do not beguile me with your times and your temporal limitations on my island hopping… yet.).
What things do you stay on top of when you plan a big event?
Lillie update: I spent about a half day cleaning the camper up, assessing electrical systems and (most importantly) sealing up the roof. If you’re ever into a camper/RV/etc. the first thing you want to check is the condition of the roof. The second you get a leak, you start into problems that include structural issues. These are things you don’t want on a house that hurtles at 55 mph+ down the highway.
We just bought some LED light bulbs to replace the incandescents in the camper. They consume 8x less energy, which means we can run off of batteries (“dry docked” or “boondocked” in RVese) that much longer. As soon as I get my battery meter installed I intend to run the lights and charge up some the computers off the batteries and see how long we can go. That will inform the decision to go with a solar system or not. After consulting with my father (an electrical engineer) the best bet may be to do a solar system that charges just the electronics rather than hook yet another charging mechanism into the camper batteries… that would be a third method (the alternator charges the batteries as we roll and when we plug into electric at a campsite or home, they charge). Apparently cleaner systems are more efficient. Go figure.
Here are some “before redesign” interior shots and I’m out:
