general


We plan to leave on our ultimate volksvegan adventure two weeks from now. It’s time to move fast! This week is my last week of work, and I’ve been getting ready for the big yard sale this Saturday.

Seneca has been working on the bus of course. Today he is installing the auxillery battery (it fits perfectly under the driver’s seat). It will run the stereo, super-bright headlights, and anything plugged into the cigarette lighter socket (like my laptop!) so we don’t have to take power away from the main battery. Just a little added reliability is nice. Eventually we could get a solar panel that charges the batteries as well. If we had the money for that sort of thing…

We are also figuring out a more portable option for filtering grease on the road, and decided to get a new pump that can be powered by the bus (instead of having to plug it in) and it’s much smaller and more powerful. We’ll use the filters in casings that we have now, but Sen ordered one for the end that goes down to 1 micron. Clean grease is very important, especially now that our baby got a new engine.

And in other news, I recently bought a domain name for this blog, volksvegan.org. It’ll take a bit to set it up, but I’ll let you know when to update your bookmarks! :) I’m off to get ready and plan this trip!

Well, we didn’t get to take our maiden voyage this weekend. :( The bus is still in the shop, due to a couple other parts that needed replaced. It should be done tomorrow, so we’ll be taking our maiden voyage this coming weekend to the Santa barter fair (it’s only about an hour away). So sadly my parents didn’t get to check out the grease bus, but Sen & I will get to take our first grease-fueled trip in it together, and we’ll be able to camp in it all weekend. Joy! :)

I did take some grease-collecting pictures and will try to get those up soon. We’re getting pretty quick at it due to a fancy-pants filtration system that Sen & Andy set up to pump the grease out and through three filters so it’s ready to go in the tank. Now that we have 5 sources of grease, our exhaust will smell like a mix of Mexican food, Chinese food, greasy bar food, and hashbrowns!

Welcome to my new blog, all about the adventures of myself and my boyfriend and our 1982 VW diesel Vanagon. I hope to share stories, pictures, insights, and lessons learned as we convert our bus to run on Waste Vegetable Oil using a GreaseCar conversion kit. We’re also getting the bus bio-diesel ready (she’ll need a diesel and a grease tank) and restoring her as best we can. Of course we’ll be learning a lot about sustainable transportation (and VWs) along the way.

Stay tuned, this blog (like the bus) is a work in progress!