As many of you already know, I live in a campervan and travel around the country, posting diaries of places I visit. When I started my travels almost four years ago, I ran a diary series explaining how everything was set up. I am now re-running it, since some of my methods have changed and the diaries have been expanded and updated.
Most people can’t live without their TV or DVD. I don’t have a TV set in the van, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get to watch TV shows or movies. I just use my laptop instead of a TV. This actually isn’t much of a change for me, since years before I left my apartment and became a van-dwelling nomad, I had already cut the cable cord and gotten all my TV shows and movies online.
So now, if I am parked in a place where I can get a good wifi Internet signal, I can download movies from iTunes or Amazon or Hulu or Netflix or whatever.
As for TV, I usually prefer to watch nature, science, or history documentaries, and the best place to get those is on YouTube, where there are a large number of such shows uploaded from PBS or the BBC or the Discovery Channel. Many cable channels, like the Smithsonian Channel or the History Channel, also have websites that offer free downloads for selected recent episodes. If I have a good wifi signal, I can watch as I stream. If there’s no wifi where I am parked, I can go to a mall or library where there is a good signal, and use one of the various free YouTube downloaders to store the shows I want on my hard drive so I can watch them anytime later.
Whether or not TV rots one’s brain, of course, depends entirely upon what one is watching. Watching PBS or the BBC makes one smarter; watching soap operas or reality shows … um …… does not. One big advantage of watching TV online, though, is that it makes an entire range of non-American TV available: some of the best educational documentaries in the world come from English-language versions of British, Japanese, German, Arabic, French, and Chinese TV.
I can also watch over-the-air network TV on my laptop, using software and a digital TV antenna/tuner that plugs into my USB port and streams live TV to Windows Media Player. Usually no matter where I am, I can get at least a few channels. I mostly use this to watch the local PBS station if I can get it, and to watch local TV news and weather.
I also have a small portable DVD player to watch movies. I resisted the temptation for a long time, since they are another thing that I have to charge up once in a while, but I finally gave in. These don’t really use much electricity and can be run or charged from the outlet to your solar electricity system. In addition to TV and movies, I have a Kindle reader on my laptop for ebooks, and a large variety of downloaded MP3 files for listening to music or podcasts.