Charging a battery at the neighbour ... reminds me about my first boat, in Tromsø. I had it by anchor, for more than a year it was without a working engine (I managed to break the starter engine ... that particular VP MD5-model came without a hand-crank, and I never bothered to fix it) and no solar panel (I eventually bought that - should have bought it in the first place!) so to charge the battery I had to carry the battery out of the boat and into the dhingy, row it in land, then carry it home up the hills (I lived 32 metres above sea level) - and back again all the way when it was charged.
I once did a 3-week vacation with the boat, visiting a friend living in a village in Finnmark, some years earlier he bought a house there for 50.000 NOK. The village school was also abandoned, he bought the school for the same price. We had an autopilot and my laptop, except for that not much electricity consumption, so we somehow managed the whole trip only charging the batteries some few times (I think we saw the civilization and electricity only three times on that journey).