A to Z Honesty - V is for Vital Stove

OK CLASS, listen up! This here is an INFORMATIVE post, which means you will come away having lurnt something. I so rarely do "INFORMATIVE" posts that I thought you deserved fair warning. Those who have no room for new stuff in their brains can leave, now. *watching entire blogaverse unceremoniously leave* (And yes, I spelled lurnt like that on porpoise.)

That weird looking thing in the photo is a Vital Stove. Dave saw it online and ordered it from my ex's Home Hardware store in Haliburton but you can find it online or ask about it at your local outdoors store, like Algonquin Outfitters. In case you couldn't tell by the ginormous green canoe on my banner, Dave and I are rabid outdoorsy type people. One of the highlights of our outdoorsy year is our spring fishing trip to Kiosk, Ontario - part of Algonquin Park. In fact, we're going on Friday (CAN'T WAIT! WOOT!) and thus won't be online for five days because there is no interweeb in the great outdoors. I am going to pre-post the end of A to Z because I feel obligated to finish what I started but unfortunately won't be around to go blog-hopping or add comments. Forgive me!

We won't be taking the Vital Stove this weekend, however, because we will have our outrageously luxurious trailer with amenities like a microwave and a furnace (I know, crazy right?) but we won't have any fancy stuff when we go on our canoe trip into Algonquin Park this summer. It'll be just us, our canoe and enough freeze dried grub to send the astronauts into orbit. When you're packing everything on your back, the last thing you want is extra weight. A traditional camp stove is a heavy thing all by itself, but then you have to cart around either camp fuel or bottles of propane. All of it has to be carried in and all of it has to be carried out. You can get to resent things like camp stoves on long portages, trust me.

That's why this Vital Stove thing is SO COOL. First of all, it's tiny and weighs practically nothing. Plus it folds up to about the size of a Kindle. To use it, you unfold it, put a battery in the blower-thing, and load up the teeny fuel reservoir with bits of kindling and tiny chunks of wood. You just need a handful and it can be scavenged from dead stuff lying on the ground. You light it and then turn on the blower. (In the picture, above, Dave is adjusting the blower.) The blower pushes oxygen into the teeny tiny fire and suddenly you have a goldurned blast furnace! The heat coming from this ridiculously small stove can boil a pot of water in a few minutes!

So that's the Vital Stove. You can imagine how happy I was that Dave bought a new contraption that started with a V. That's him, by the way, under Misty's close supervision. Misty doesn't really care about the Vital Stove. All she cares about is if it cooks bacon. Honestly, that's all I care about, too.