March 06, 2006

This is a view I'll be seeing quite a lot of. Fortunately, the scenery will change. I won't be paid well or allowed to use explosives, though (10 Astonished Points to anyone who can peg that reference. Hint: "He's got space dementia!").

Right now, the entire idea of the trip seems like bad craziness. I've got the kind of jitters that knock down forests, and the fact that we're about to go to contract on the house makes it worse. Yep: I'm really trading a roof over my head for a nylon tent. Some days that makes all kinds of sense to me. Lately, it's been completely unreal. So I'm having bouts of the Big Unreality at the moment. Big bouts, landing on my face! It's all laughs until someone loses their lunch.

Working on the build helps a bit. I've been designing and re-designing the various systems in my mind for months - where to put the solar panels, how to carry the batteries, what switches to use, and so on. Now that I've actually got the trike, and can see just how laughably impractical some of my ideas are, I can really...no, wait, that sucks! I have to build all this stuff in less than two months! Agh!!! To the Bat Medicine Cabinet, Boy Wonder! Bring me the Bat Benzodiazepines!

Sort of. I am having to scale a couple of things back - no portable amateur radio transceiver, because 1) the sunspot cycle is at its ebb, which means that radio wave propagation on the 10-meter band sucks and the transceiver would be useless weight, and 2) I don't have enough time to study for the exams that would allow me to upgrade my license so I can use other, better bands. The switching system for the various solar panel and battery power options will be less complex, because the installation of the cellular antenna mast means that I don't have as much room on the trike's rear rack as I thought I would, so everything has to fit into a smaller box.

Today, I hitched the trailer up and laid the folding solar panels out across its rack to see what options I have for deploying them while I'm riding.

That's what you're looking at here - viewed from the back, across the solar panels. When I get them properly strung up with cunning bungie cords, they'll be stretched flat, ready to suck up the sun's photons and use them to power my gadgets and my forward-mounted anti-jerk laser cannon.

The times when this wacky scheme of mine seem the most real are when I'm actually on the trike, which is a good thing, because it'd be bad news indeed if it felt like an impossible task while I was pedaling.

If I manage to pull this off, even I'll be impressed. However, I am fully anticipating that, at some early point in the trip - maybe even the first day - I will roll to a stop by the side of a road I've never been on before, lean over, and heave my most recent meal into the ditch.

I expect I'll feel better afterwards, though, so I'm kind of looking forward to it.