A few weeks ago we received a couple of sucre cane sticks from a farmer which had his field close to the place where we were charging our expedition car with solar panels. As we never used sugar cane in our lives, we asked around and did some research. It was rather simple what you can do with it; cut it into small pieces after removing the skin and bite it; which results in releasing a sweetish liquid. It acts as a reward on your brain in the form of a nice sweet taste. The work you have to do for it, the chewing, is proportional to the reward. At a certain point you will be done with chewing sugar cane.
Thanks to innovation we can now grab a sugar cube or two, but it doesn’t cost your body much work to do so; the reward is not in balance to the work.
This balance is sometimes difficult in our expedition. Laying out the panels, charging during hot days, and cleaning everything up again at the end of the day costs quite a bit of energy. But for me, it feels balanced. Sometimes it’s just not fun to charge with solar panels, but when we see the percentage of our expedition car battery at the end of the day, we always end up with a “High five”.
The fact that we have driven more than 5,550 km on the energy of the sun still remains something difficult for me to comprehend. Looking at the ground we charge on, there is no difference between before and after charging. The tracks of our tires are the only reminder of the place where we charged our expedition car.