Equipment We Never Use (and What We Use Instead)

I know what you're thinking you're thinking boy that's a lot of equipment that's not getting used I'm Kristen welcome back to travels and travails where we show you how to live life off the beaten path so one of the reasons why I brought you here to show you all this stuff is so that you don't make the same mistakes that we did so early on we bought a lot of equipment which I'm going to show you and we found out that maybe the equipment that we bought wasn't exactly going to meet our needs Doug really likes his chairs and so as you'll see we have a lot of chairs that we're not using right now these Coleman chairs are great because they have the tray that you can put your drink on also you can put your food on it but they're really heavy and they're not as comfortable as the second iteration which is the zero gravity chairs and these zero gravity chairs we love them but they fell apart we would put them in the Casita and they would fall apart the bolts and nuts would come out and then or screws whatever the screws would come out now and then we'd end up with parts and chairs that we couldn't even use so we'd use them here on the patio now so it's not a complete waste and the Coleman chairs we use when we have a party so we weren't throwing our money away but I'll show you what we use instead instead we use these picot chairs and these Pico chairs are really compact they're fairly comfortable they do have a little pocket right here that you can put your drink in in another pocket right here for your phone but the great thing about them is that they're so compact they're fairly lightweight and they're very compact so they fit in the back of the truck really nicely now we're getting to the point where we have a lot of equipment and we need the space so one of the other things that we got is this Outlander Fireball and it does put out a nice hot fire but the thing about it is is that it only lasts about two hours on a 20 pound tank of propane and so it's not very practical we still use it once in a blue moon if we have a big crowd because what we're going with now is the ignic fire can and it's very Compact and small it's pretty heavy but it's very small and Compact and then it also we had to buy the holder for the five pound propane and this thing it just sips propane but it really puts out a great fire for about four people so I really do like that so the other thing that we don't use anymore and we probably haven't used for a while is this old Coleman table and the reason why we don't use that Coleman table anymore is because it's really hard it's so challenging to put together I had to have Doug put it together and I'll show you what we do use instead the table that we have now instead of using that old Coleman now we're using the king Camp table and I really like it it's a little bit heavy but it's a lot easier to set up it doesn't have a million pieces and it's very compact I really like that too we bought this really nice step stool there was a couple times when we were camping and this step we were really unlevel and the step was really Steep and so we bought this little step stool so that we didn't have to jump out every time we wanted to get out of the Casita but what we got instead is Doug installed this double step and it folds up and then it slides in just like your regular step would but the thing about it is that that I'm not a fan of is that it sits way down so it's almost the lowest point on the Casita and you know we like to get off the beaten path and so when we're trying to get off the beaten path and that's the lowest point it's sometimes we've drug it through dirt and that's not that good for the step probably not that good for the Casita either let's see what else oh another thing that we are not going to be using anymore that we love and has been great for us is the jackery so we have the jackery 1000 and if you've seen any of our other videos on this you know that this runs my hair dryer and also my coffee maker which I'll talk about in a minute and we got these really nice solar panels to go with it and so it worked great but it takes up a lot of space in the Casita so what we got instead unoix sent us two batteries and we also bought an inverter so with the two lithium batteries the inverter and then you know that we already have the solar we have 135 watts of solar and we're good to go and I could run my hair dryer to my heart's content and I can run my coffee maker until I'm sick of coffee and I love that so talking about how we cook so here you can see right here I used to use this to make my coffee it's a percolator and it works great but it's messy when you take the grounds out of here it's very messy so what I use now instead I'm using what is kind of like a Keurig style coffee maker and so I just throw away the pods and it's not really super messy we just threw some old pans in here a while back and I'll tell you we rarely use these pans and I'll show you in a minute what we do use instead so we got the Omnia instead that's one of the things that we use and it comes with a little muffin tin see this just pops out right here and you can make muffins and it and then the silicone liner makes cleanup really a breeze and I love this because we can have baked goods we can bake you know the Casita doesn't have an oven I mean if you know anything about Casitas you can never even order a casita with an oven so the other thing that we use that we really like is the black stone and the black stone and the reason why I love it is because Doug Cooks on it that's the main reason but you know we do our breakfast on the Blackstone it doesn't make it we can cook bacon on it and it doesn't make a big mess of the Casita and we can cook outside and that is really nice and it's fun the Omnia just goes on the stove top that's what it is a little stovetop cooker so I usually just put it on the stove top in here and I have all the gizmos little dial right there the thermometer to show me what the temperature is so I can get it everything all copacetic so that's how we cook now oh here's a big thing right here you know what this is right this is the cushion that was originally in the Casita and oh boy I tried I know a lot of people put pads on top of these they'll buy a pad from Amazon or something like that and try to make this comfortable and I tried that and it did not work and it especially didn't work for Doug it feels like you're just laying right on the fiberglass in the Casita so what we got instead were the Southern Comfort beds and we really love the Southern Comfort beds when you order them you can order them with either a hard side or like a firm I guess I should say a firm side or a soft side so that's what we got and we love them here's something that we're doing a little bit differently it we used to put our clothes in bags like this just your regular duffel bag you know you zip it up well we don't use the duffel bag anymore because we found something better so as you may know Doug put shelves in her closet and so in our closet we have this little cloth pull out drawer we both have one and it's really nice I like it because I can take it inside and then once I take it inside I just fill it up with all my clothes and then I put it back in here and I have access to everything I don't have to unzip a duffel and I really like that oh while we're here I did add this shoe rack we didn't have anywhere to put our shoes before so it's not replacing anything it's just doing its job right there another thing is I love this this was by the side of my bed and I hung all my fings in it now Trinity sleeps there in between our beds so before we had Trinity it was great now it just ends up full of dog hair so it's not that much fun anymore if you have a suggestion on what else I could do for storage you know if you have a casita you're always looking for more storage opportunities so put that in the description below did you know that these plastic wheel chocks have an expiration date on them if you have them go look at yours because the expiration date is right here on the side and it says replace after 12 2013. so we haven't used these we I think we used this when we had the Scamp and we bought it in 2013. so what we have now is the max Hall wheel chocks and those don't go bad and they work really well they don't slide these things they slide and the max chocks won't slide on you so right here we have the sink cover so we used to have a wooden cover that Doug made for me but the thing I like about this is I can still pour stuff out I just got this on Amazon it rolls up and rolls right out of the way if I want to get it out of the way it's no big deal if I want to set stuff on it or dry the dishes that's what it is it's a dish drying rack I can do that or I can just if I want to pour out liquids I can just like I want to pour out the last of my coffee or something I can just pour that right in there and I really like that so now I'm going to tell you about one of my favorite things so we used to use this vacuum and it I had to plug it in and we had to have power so we either needed to be plugged into Shore power or need to be plugged in here at the house and then dead got me this I love it and what this is It's a DeWalt battery powered vacuum and I think you can get other manufacturers make them as well Doug got me this as a gift and they say don't ever buy your wife a vacuum well in this case they were wrong because I really love love that vacuum it works great it stows easily I don't have to be on short power now we do have to charge the battery up periodically and so we do have to carry a charger and that's one more thing but yeah we can just plug it now that we have 110 power in the Casita I can just plug it right into the Casita so you can just plug it in whenever it's convenient for you I really like it so we're going to go back into the Casita because we used to have bed spreads in here and we bought these betties and the Betty's you can see them right now they have been a lifesaver I tell you making the bed was a 25 step process and now it's about a one step process so the thing is it's a one piece it's kind of like a sleeping bag that goes on the bed and when you get ready to wash it then you just take it off the bed and you throw it in the washing machine and you just put it right back on it was making the bed was a real chore to before I'll tell you so I'm really happy to have the beddies the colors are kind of neutral so you don't really have a lot of options for colors but I made it work in here if you're interested in buying any other things we have an Amazon store and there's a couple different ways that you can get to the Amazon store one way is I'll put a link in the description and the other way is if you go to travelsintervails.com and you go to our resources page there's a link right there where you can see everything in our Amazon store if you'd like to see some more content like this check out these videos

Channel: Travels & Travails

Views: 61,846

Keywords: Travels and Travails

Id: wCyJX3CRqWU

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 01 2022