We’ve found the female equivalent to Buddy! She’s called Naz, and she’s as mad as Buddy, just with longer hair.

Our new housesit it amazing. We are in a grand old house dating back to the 1700s. Benjamin Franklin’s niece, Ann Fuller, built this house in 1743. It still had all the original floorboards and original features. The property is on 60 acres of woodland, and it’s great for walking the dogs.

We have two dogs to look after. Naz, who has unlimited energy, who constantly wants to play and when we go for walks, she darts all over the place. She has a GPS collar so we can keep track of her.

Bella is the older dog of 11 years old and she is a sweetheart. She just plods along on our walks, usually bringing up the rear. Sometimes on a downhill section, she loses control and get’s a run on.

Then there’s the pigs, five of them. We have to feed them twice a day. On our first day we went out at 7.30am to feed them and they were all still fast asleep! I didn’t realise pigs slept in. So we feed them later in the day now, so as not to disturb their sleep.

There are 9 hens and a rooster and they are producing about 8 eggs a day. Way too much to keep up with. Thankfully there is also a never ending supply of zucchini, so we’ve been making zucchini slice. Now we just need a never ending supply of bacon…

We’ve had two magificent days of fine weather, but today is raining and storms and tornadoes are forecast this afternoon. Hopefully we don’t need to use the basement.

We have ordered a whole heap of stuff from Amazon to do some more enhancements to our van. Our house battery is useless and doesn’t keep charge overnight, so when we wake up, there is no power. So with lots of discussions with brother John, we have opted for two 100AH AGM batteries (our current one is only 64 AH) and we needed some extra things to make these work with our current charger. Hopefully they will arrive this week so Mike can get working!

We have also ordered a composting toilet, the same model as we had in Justin. We thought we could make do with the one we have, which flushes into a black tank, but if we leave it a few days it starts to smell. It’s not like NZ where there are free dump stations everywhere. Unless you are staying at a campground, they will charge $25 to dump, and a state park if you can find one, will charge $10 to dump. So it’s really hindering our freedom camping experiences.

So, with the new batteries, and a composting toilet, we should be able to go off-grid for a lot longer and not worry about a smelly tank.