The south end of the beach at Hua Hin, Thailand.
Where are Kevin and Ruth now? Hua Hin, Thailand.

Where are Kevin and Ruth going next? Maldives on March 23rd.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

A beautiful day exploring Ubeda, Spain.

Yesterday morning's project was to hook up our new inverter.

Louis isn't really really set up for boondocking (wild camping) the way we like to. They have a single marine style deep cycle 12v battery for the house, and of course a normal vehicle battery for the engine.

And they have a small inverter already. But it's one of those cigarette lighter plug in ones. And although there are two cigarette lighter power outlets, they both operate off the engine battery rather than the house battery. And, there's only power going to them when the engine is running and/or the ignition is on.

We could charge our devices while driving, but not while sitting still. We had to make some changes.

So the new 150 watt inverter also had a cigarette lighter power outlet style of plug on it. But it's kind of Mickey Mouse, so I cut that off and wired it directly to the house battery. Of course like any motorhome, things are hard to get at. The house battery is located underneath the passenger seat. Really, you need to remove the seat to get at it properly! But, I worked around that and got the job done.

Louis, getting some sun at the aire in Ubeda, Spain.

As you can see in the above photo, Louis comes with a fold up 60 watt solar panel. It's actually a nice little setup, with a built in charge controller. And with lots of sun like we had yesterday, it's sufficient to charge up that one house battery.

The house battery is only two years old apparently, but Louis' owner had mentioned he thought it was on it's way out. In fact, they even left us some money to replace the battery if we thought we needed to. And we might...but we'll see how we make out now that I have the inverter hooked up to it.

With that done, we went for a walk to the historic central area of Ubeda (pop 106,000).

The city backs onto a hill with a beautiful view.

Olive tree plantations down below.

Lots of beautiful old doors!

Not a cloud in the sky.

Casa de las Torres.

Palacio de los Medinilla.

People out and about.

Lots of little streets and alleyways to wander.

Ruth at the Iglecia de San Pablo.

The plaza is empty.

All of the people are at the restaurants!

The restaurants in the central area aren't cheap. Most of them have a menu del dia (menu of the day) which includes three courses for about €12 ($17.50 CAD, $13.00 USD) plus a drink on top of that. The menu prices do include both tax and tip though so I guess it's not too bad.

Sacra Capilla del Salvador.

There are no pickup trucks in Spain.

Another beautiful view of the olive tree plantations.

We love this lantern.

Most things are closed up between 2:00pm and 5:00pm. We had actually planned on going out again in the evening, but when it came time we just didn't feel like it so we stayed in and played cards.

Another beautiful sunny day, but it's a little chilly. It went down to the freezing mark last night.

We're headed to the coast! Likely won't make it there today, but probably tomorrow.

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37 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. It is a gorgeous area, too bad it is so cold here at the moment or we would stay in this area a little longer. :-(

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  2. Love following journey and door photos. Thanks for sharing.

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    1. Glad you are enjoying the photos and our adventures!

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  3. Everything looks so clean & neat. Oh, those views - love it when you can see for miles & miles!!!!

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    1. In general it is pretty clean and neat, especially in the cities and towns, except for the dog "poo", you really have to watch where you are walking!

      We love those beautiful vistas as well. :-)

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  4. So nice that you can enjoy Europe in an rv. that is more our style. Have fun.

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    Replies
    1. We have to agree, to really see the country the best way to travel is in an RV!

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  5. The images are stunning thank you kindly for sharing.

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    1. Thank you for the comment Diana and for following along on our journey. :-)

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  6. Looks like a lovely city! Hurry and get to the coast to stay warm. Hope the new inverts helps!

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    1. Won't be long and we will be back at the coast. It's hard though because there is so much to see!!!

      The new inverter is working out well. :-)

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  7. Treat yourselves and go out for some tapas, it is our favorite way to eat and not too expensive. We did that a lot in Barcelona. We even do that for greek food as we can easily make salad and souvalki at home so we get five appies for a wonderful meal.

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    1. We haven't been treating ourselves out to tapas or a meal because we know we will be doing more of that in the next few weeks to a month when we meet up with our friends Glen and Steve and also when my cousin, Helen and her husband Tony arrive and spend time with us.

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  8. We found to that we could only boondock for 2 nights and then its time for water, dump and get the battery charged up again by driving. We dont have a solar panel which would have come in handy. But not ready to spend the €250! Think would be kind of hard to take back to Canada with us 😉

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    1. If we were to buy a motorhome in Europe the first thing we would do is to invest the money and have solar panels placed on the roof, I am sure you would get your money back when it came time to sell the unit. We have had solar on our roof and 4 batteries in our motorhome back in Canada and we would never own a motorhome again without having this installed. Too us, it is just a necessity and it makes life so much easier. Having this unit now that we have installed a better inverter has helped, especially because they already have the portable solar panel so if we like a place then we can stay longer than just a day or two.

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  9. Ubeda is my born town, I'm glad you like it! A few years back it became illegal to not to pick your dog's poo from the floor, but it looks like some ubetenses still don't know it LOL.

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    1. It normally takes a while before people start to pay attention to the rules, and they need to have enough people complain to those not picking up to really have any effect. Hopefully it will improve more in time.

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  10. Your friends in Valle de Juarez talked about you and your blog around a delicious lunch at The Troje today. 8 of us met at La Cocinita for breakfast. Barb and Sal, Heinz and Uli, Sandy and daughter Melissa, and newcomers -us- Jerry and Becky Cope. We hiked down to the Waterfall at Mazamitla. What a special treat! Then back to Hacienda Contreras. We are the only MH here. It is perfectly safe every where we have been but we see few RV's anywhere. We'd encourage everyone to make the trip. Just follow Kevin and Ruth's travels and you will have no problems. PS We all read your blog every day. PSS We visited Whiskey's tree. It is lovely, full of flowers. Enjoy Spain!

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    1. Glad to see that you are enjoying that area, it is one of our most favourite in all of Mexico! Say hi to everyone for us! We are really missing not being there this year but we are also enjoying this new adventure of ours.

      So nice to hear that Whiskey's tree is doing so well. We sure do miss her but we know she is in a good place there.

      Hope you have a a good journey through Mexico.

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  11. Loving all these pictures and information ! But, you left me hanging with a question - no pickups in Spain?

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    1. Hi Carol...nope, there are no pick up trucks in most of Europe. Too hard on fuel, and they don't fit on some of the narrow streets in the towns.

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    2. When I was in Italy, you would see these tiny 3-wheeled pickup trucks. Hardly bears a resemblance to the North American ones. Like this: https://margieinitaly.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/tiny-pickup-truck-in-italy-1007x670.jpg

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    3. We have seen work trucks similar to these, just not 3-wheeled ones here but we definitely would not consider these a pickup truck.

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  12. Just wondering what you plug into the inverter, a laptop? every time you change voltage there are losses, 12v to 110v to 18v. Its more efficient to get a 12 convertor to step up to 18v, or what ever you require, they are multivoltage. They have a cigarette plug on them. The first thing we did on our class C was fit a cigarette socket on the house battery, cant live without it. I cant find one on Amazon at the moment. They are around $20, the one I have is a Vanson brand.

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    1. sorry, not sure why my google ID didnt publish with that comment...

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    2. Hi Jim. Yes, you are correct that there are some minor power losses during the transformation. Yes, the inverter is mostly for the the laptops, two of them. I
      ll look into your suggestion when we get back to Canada. I wonder why they're not more common?

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    3. I'll email you a pic of the package, might help locate one.

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    4. Thank you Jim, Kevin received it and will look into getting one.

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  13. Where did you get the population info from? Ubeda is about 35,000 inhabitants.

    I hope you liked it!

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    1. I'm not sure where I got it from,but I obviously made a mistake! Thanks for the correction Fidel...yes, we liked Ubeda a lot!

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  14. I make mistakes all the time on our blog so it is refreshing when someone of your blogging experience makes a mistake as well. Thank you. Our friends are boondocking for the first time beside us with a 37 ft. fifth wheel and they only have one 12 volt battery. That makes for a good learning experience on power management. I think they will get more power soon. So glad you are having all that fun over there. The weather here is not much different that there. 6C this morning in Quartzsite Arizona.

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    1. Yeah, Kevin isn't quite sure how he made that one, other than he happened to be looking at the population of another city and got the two mixed up. We certainly aren't perfect, even though we try to be! ;-)

      We sure miss Sherman's capability of making his own power and just about always having plenty of it on hand. Never again will we own a motorhome that isn't properly equipped with solar and enough battery power for our needs.

      The weather was much better today now that we are down by the coast. I was actually wearing capris and sandals this afternoon! :-)

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  15. I like those old narrow streets. I wonder how many olives are produced in such a large grove of trees?

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    1. We have wondered the same thing. To give you an idea though one tree will produce approximately 15-20kg (33-44lb) of olives during one season. The region that we were in is Andalucia and it is the largest olive growing area in the world.

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    2. I just toured a Californian olive oil farm last week, and they said it could take up to 60 lb of olives to produce a gallon of olive oil. So that suggests that it would take a full season's growth from 1-2 trees to produce a gallon of olive oil.

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    3. Yep, that sounds about right. We had also read that the Andalucia region where we have been seeing all these olive trees has about 40 million trees!

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