TerraSante: A Cabin Cruiser Can Be A Cabin
I started out at TerraSante sleeping in my car. It made sense at first. I have a magnet-edged length of mosquito netting in the shape of its two passenger side windows so I can open them and have breeze without being eaten alive by every tiny night-flying bloodsucker out there, but it turned out to be unnecessary. You see, the long arm of Hurricane Michael left in its wake a series of unseasonably cold nights. I didn't want breeze. I wanted another couple of layers of warmth.
Things came to a head when I'd been here a week. I woke up after midnight with my teeth chattering. Thinking that the heat island that is the city would not be as bad, I drove to downtown Tucson, ate some quite good shrimp tacos at an all night Mexican restaurant, and slept in the parking lot of a 24-hour supermarket. When I got back to TerraSante, I did some complaining and was offered a cabin.
A lot of things are cabins here. The tipi and the earth bag structure you've already seen. There are also at least two converted buses and a few more conventional RVs. Then there's this:
https://instagram.com/p/BpXbPrgFWc6
Her name is Windrose. She is in permanent dry dock here, dug into the ground a bit so she stays upright. She leaks a little in the rain, a condition that I intend to remedy, and the bedding inside was hopeless and needed to be removed, but after I replaced it with my own and got settled in, she turned out to be decently insulated and quite comfortable... until the night after the hailstorm.
https://instagram.com/p/BpSeUrEFePd
The weather warmed up almost as soon as the storm was over, but you see, there's this thing called evaporative cooling. When a surface is wet and the moisture is evaporating, it's taking the heat in that surface with it, so the surface cools. This is why we humans sweat when it's hot. The process is especially efficient when the air is dry, as it almost always is here in Arizona. After a storm, things will be wet and they will get wetter because the dew will be heavy, and then the night wind will flow over that dew and evaporate it and, thus, Nature was running the AC all over the region. The weather service said it only got down to 55 F that night, but the small thermometer in the boat said it was a good fifteen degrees below that, which was kind of beyond the pay grade of my three-season sleeping bag.
In the morning, I asked what people do here, given that it is known to get a lot colder than this when real winter arrives. They said "More blankets." Now, as it happens, I had just spent the previous Saturday in Tucson going to garage sales and secondhand stores and one of the things I got was a feather comforter, king size, used very little, for $5. I bought it to donate to TerraSante, for anyone who shows up needing an extra warm blanket. I didn't know that would be me.