Inverter gone bad!

The other morning, I turned on our inverter and immediately heard sparks. Uh oh. That's not good. I shut it down right away, and tried it again. This time, I left it on despite the sparking, and within about five seconds it shut down automatically and went into fault mode.

The night before, it had been working perfectly. What happened between then, and the time I turned it on the next morning? Who knows. Electronics don't last forever. But it should last more than 9 months!

And inverters are expensive in Europe, at least compared to the U.S. or even Canada. We had paid €98 for this one and it was only a 300 watt, although it was pure sine wave. It would still be under warranty, if we happen to make it back to Netherlands to put in a claim before June 27th!

For those who don't know, we use an inverter to change our battery power into useable household electricity. The only thing we use it for is to charge our laptops, so we don't need a very powerful one. 

Fortunately, we carry a backup "plug in" style 75 watt inverter. A laptop tends to use about 60 watts on average, so this is good enough to let one of us plug in at a time. The battery in my laptop isn't in very good shape, but Ruth's is so she plugs in while we're driving and it's normally full by the time we park up.

So while it's frustrating, it's not a disaster by any means.

Yesterday morning, we were up at 6:30am in order to make our way through the big city of Mersin (population 1 million).

On the road before 7:00am!

As expected, very little traffic.

And we made it through the busiest part of the city without any problems at all. But towards the outskirts of the eastern side of the city, it got busy with all kinds of buses and vans. It was kind of odd.

Only 20 minutes later!

We made our way to the smaller city of Tarsus (pop 300,000), although it kind of feels like a suburb of Mersin. I've read that the entire Mersin region has a population of about 3 million, and it is Turkiye's third most inhabited area.

I had read that Tarsus has a municipal campground that is totally free. We arrived there and the gate was open but there was nobody around. It was busy enough though, with six other vans already parked up. Of course we were early, so I parked out of the way to see if anybody would leave later on.

Of the six vans, one had Poland plates, one was Switzerland, and the rest were Turkiye.

You can see Max parked out of the way on the right.

The Poland van left, but I thought we were better off staying where we were. The other vans looked too packed together, and Max likes his space. I was able to run our extension cord from where we were parked. Free electric, but not at the sites. You have to run a cord to the washroom building. The place is a little run down, but the washroom is clean and they have a place to empty your holding tank.

There is a maximum stay of three nights, and we might actually stay that long.

The old central area is a half hour or so walk away, and there are a few things to see there, but we will do that today. Yesterday after lunch we walked over to the nearby waterfall.

It's a kind of an interesting series of waterfalls. There is a sign that says the river was purposely rerouted sometime between the years 525 and 550AD and the new flow went through an old Roman cemetery. The water flowed through the graves and caused waterfalls from the lower sections of the graves. Of course there has been a lot more erosion since then, and it has made for a really scenic area.

Ruth, and the Tarsus sign.

There is a bit of a cold snap going through this area. High of only 10C (50F) today, and lows close to freezing. Glad we can use our electric heater!

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