Tag: rosinante

Living on a mountain in Winter in Georgia (January 2024)

Our cars had been stuck in a parking lot for weeks when a massive excavator came and cleaned the masses of snow in the parking lot.

The massive machine had a lot to do with it and in the end I gifted the driver a bottle of wine.

Living in Gudauri at 2200m during winter was an interesting experience. Things change a lot with the cold. Of course Rosinante’s heater was running a lot. And I had to clean our cars from the snow because sometimes the layer of snow was nearly a meter thick after a night of snowfall.

Once while cleaning the cars, a tourist family from India came by and asked if they may clean parts of the snow because it looks interesting and they never had to do it in their life. I was happy to let them do so and they had a lot of fun.

We couldn’t open Rosinante’s roof because the heater was not able to maintain the warmth with the popped up roof and so our living space got much more limited and we had to deal with humidity and ice on the inside of some parts of our camper cabin. But we did very well and it was adventurous.

In the beginning we tried to use the heater as little as necessary, but next time I’d just keep it running all day and night and regulate the temperature by opening the windows more or less.

And the route leading to Gudauri was crazy. After Gudauri this road leads to the only real border between Georgia and Russia and so all the trucks have to take it.

Because of the changes in temperature, the trucks and everything else, the condition of the roads got worse. One of the sharp corners broke so much that trucks got stuck for hours blocking the whole road. Other times the mountain pass leading to the border or the border itself got closed and all the trucks got stuck in Gudauri on the road. No chance to turn back or go further.

Whoopy’s refused to turn on after some nights with about -18 degrees Celsius and so she had to wait until the temperatures had risen again. But then it started without any problems.

And from time to time we had the best pizza in all of Georgia!

Arriving on the winter mountain, Christmas, work and Whoop, whoop (December 2023)

We arrived in Gudauri, the biggest ski resort in Georgia. Racki had found a job for the winter season there and so we decided to stay all winter season on 2200 meters.

When we arrived, it was mostly around -15 degrees Celsius and I was pretty sick. My stomach hurt a lot and I felt very weak and low. We had to keep Rosinante’s roof closed so that the heater was able to keep it warm. So this start was pretty intense.

Racki’s first job was good and she had nice colleagues. The payment was not comparable to the salaries in Germany but that we knew this before. The hotel Racki was working at was far from ready for the season and so there was a whole lot to do.

It was snowing a lot and I had to clean the snow from our cars every day because otherwise they just would have been buried completely.

Whoopy came visiting us for Christmas and we had a lot of fun. My stomach got better and that helped me a lot to get used to our new, freezing living environment. Sometimes I was missing just going out and hanging around like we were used to in summer.

When we were hanging around together, another Georgian contacted Racki for a different job. She was offering a lot more salary and after Racki and she had met on the 24th, Racki quit her first job and got a new one with a better salary and more interesting working topics. It was crazy how this was turning out.

Fitting a 220Ah battery in Rosinante (December 2023)

Racki and I went to Turkey for a border run to extend Rosinante’s stay in Georgia.

In advance, I had to find a lithium battery and bigger solar panel in Georgia, but there had been no real options. Shipping and importing from Germany would have been super expensive. So I had contacted a Turkish online shop and the owner was super friendly and had a battery and panel in stock. He had shipped it to Hopa to the Turkey-Georgia-border where we could pick it up easily.

At a small beach promenade in Hopa we started installing the panel and battery. The panel was super easy. The battery was a crazy operation! The batterie’s dimensions were perfect to fit it in the space behind our toilet but that made the wiring a puzzle.

To make it possible, we had cut our toilet at Hof Marani to be able to slide it over the battery.

We searched for cables in Hopa to make the installation easier and cleaner but had no luck finding some. But after we did shortcut the battery and nearly destroyed it, we finally made it!

It was interesting to experience the difference in Georgian and Turkish culture. In Turkey more than ten people stopped, asked if they could help us, were interested and curious. Although there are a lot of lovely and helpful people in Georgia as well, the experience would have been very different there, I guess.