Trip To The Post Office - Correo Mexicano

living.boondockingmexico@yahoo.com

I had a couple of things to mail today so I drove into El Cercado. The office is a small one but they cover quite a big rural area. I wanted to use MexPost which is a two-day service but they don't manage that from this office. So my option was to send the letters "certified". Worked out great, they put a bar code sticker on it to track it and it should take about three days. Cost was 21 pesos for a letter size manila envelope. I sent a couple of Highways magazines to a friend and some legal papers to Mexico City

An Inexpensive Portable Shower

I saw this last week on the Rv.Net forum. This is being contributed by a forum member "firstimer". I asked his permission to share it but want to make sure he gets credit for it. Here is his story and photos:

Here's an inexpensive easy to use portable shower set-up, I put together for our camper van. My wife and I showered in it for 32 days straight and it worked very well. The base is a "dirty dog" collapsible pet bath, which cost about $50 or so. Most any tub will do, but we preferred the collapsible one for space saving. We fastened two inexpensive shower curtain liners to a "hula hoop" to keep the water in. One liner wouldn't fit around the hoop, so we overlapped the ends, making a passage to enter/exit on each side. While I expected the liners would be worn out after a month's worth of showering, they held up well. The whole hoop/curtain assembly is very lightweight and can be suspended easily. In our van we used a couple lightweight collapsible curtain rods. The curtain/hoop assembly, cost about $15 for everything. For hot water we purchased a Zodi Extreme water tank. You fill it with 3 gallons of water and heat it on a stove. A stove came with the Zodi, but we used our own. After 10 minutes or so, when the water reaches 100 degrees f., you screw the pump into the top, pump it about 10 times, and you're ready to go. We changed the original shower head to a kitchen type sprayer head. We found it necessary to re pump the tank once during each shower to maintain pressure, but overall it worked very well. The Zodi is the most expensive part of the set-up, retailing for about $120. We managed to get a demo unit from Zodi for about $70. How much water does it take? Both of us took a shower off a single 3 gallon tank. We'd spray ourselves down, soap up head to toe, and then thoroughly rinse. We felt just as clean as using a regular shower at home. It's really nice to have a portable shower we can take with us anywhere we go. Happy trails!

This really show ingenuity and creativity. The sprayer is the best part. What a great thing for boondocking. This guy gets a big hand from me. Thanks for the contribution.