You might say that my world has gone to the dogs as Christine is back in Florida getting in some much needed Gramma time with our Grandson Liam, who somehow just turned TEN last week. Yikes! How did THAT happen?!?!?!? So here on Road Runner Ranch it is down to us Three Pupsketeers, Razz, Zoe and me, but we’re doing well and enjoying being surrounded by the beauty here in Southern Nevada.
Some of you may remember that the last post I did with updates on the work on Lance’s transformation was called “Mini-Split = Major Step Up: XRV Lance Update 4 May, 2025” May was a Looooooong time ago now so you may want to click on that link if you’d like a refresher.
Quite a lot of progress has happened with Lance’s transformation during the six months since that last post and I’ll do my best to cover as much as I can here in the coming weeks. To get started I’ll pick up where that update left off and catch you up on what happened between then and June 10 when we took left our place here in Nevada in Lance bound for Portland Maine for the June 21st wedding of my niece Julia to her beau Ben.
In the weeks to follow I will try to post once a week, usually on Sundays, providing updates on the work I’ve done on the different systems such as cabinetry, all the dovetail drawers, the Electrical Cabinet, rooftop solar panels and so on.
So grab a tasty beverage and a comfy seat and let’s get back to where we left off with that air conditioner/heater Mini-Split system you last saw in May.
Mini-Split is Fully Functional!
As per the title of that May 4th post, I had just finished quite literally shoehorning the exterior half of the Mini-Split unit up into the barely big enough space between Lance’s ambo box and the Kenworth frame.
And I’m very happy that I can start this week’s update with the news that I have since finished installing the Mini-Split and it is working even better than we had hoped. For those interested in the details, this is the make and model Mini-Split we decided on. It is a 9k BTU capacity “Pioneer Diamante Ultra” that is one of the most efficient models they make rated at 23.5 SEER for those who know that system. These type of two part aircon/heating systems are referred to as Mini-Splits because they consist of two parts; the outside condenser/compressor and the inside air handler evaporator. If you check out the basic features here this model provides both cooling in up to 131F/55C outside temps as well as heating when it gets down to from –13F/-25C. 9000 BTU is more than we need but the smallest model I could find so just means it won’t take much run time to keep the inside of the “Hab” as we have come to call the Habitat or Box or living quarters in Lance, just the right temperature in both hot and cold climates.
I will cover this in a later blog post but just FYI, in addition to the Mini-Split we will also have a diesel fired boiler that will heats the Glycol solution that flows through a network of PEX tubing in the floor as well as heat for two floor mounted air/glycol heat exchangers (mini radiators) so that when we head up to the Arctic, possibly this summer, we’ll stay nice and toasty. And this boiler also provides all our domestic hot water DHW for sinks and showers so stay tuned for that update in a few weeks. Back to the Mini-Split install, this is the wall mounted interior evaporator half of the system and I mounted this Air Handler above the entry door on the front passenger side of the Hab. Works out well as you can see being almost the same width as the door. There are moving louvers with one large one running across the bottom that you can see partially open here that distributes the cold/hot air up/down vertically and then inside are a set of other smaller louvers that move back and forth sideways and help move the air left and right. So this location works out very well for the heating/cooling of the interior air and yet keeps it from blowing directly on us when we are at the Settee or in bed. As you might have noticed in the earlier photos, I had to cut away part of the upper stair in the entry to fit this top right corner of the exterior half or condenser/compressor. Once I had this all solidly bolted in place to the frame of the Hab underneath (see that May post for details if you’re curious) I finished it off by building a little “cage” using extruded aluminium and some aluminium diamond plate that I had left over from cutting out some of the original ambulance cabinetry. Also added some insulation to keep the other heat/cold from getting into the Hab. The 6mm diamond plate slid nicely into the T-slot grooves of the extruded Aluminium or XAL as you can see here. All these interlocked plates and XAL turned this into somewhat of an Origami project as I needed to be able to slide some of those plates out to get inside to connect the wiring and refrigerant lines but I was quite pleased with the way it turned out in the end and still functioned well as our entry stairs. I chose the 240V model as it is a wee bit more efficient than the 120V versions and I designed our AC system that I’ll cover in more detail in a future post, to be a Split Phase system so it provides both 120 and 240 Volt power. I’m going to break the time sequence a bit here as I actually finished off this l the install of the Mini-Split when we got back from our summer marathon in Lance and was working on him at our place on Saturna Island. Next part of the install was to make up some custom copper line sets that connect the two parts and transfer the refrigerant between the exterior condenser and the interior evaporator. These copper tubes are well insulated to help with efficiency and that’s the white covering you see here.
I could do this because Lance’s ambulance box is 8 feet wide and allowed me to design both really deep drawers and countertops and still have lots of room for working in the Galley between the two countertops. I’m mentioning this because designing this space behind the drawers gives me the perfect place to run electrical cables, PEX water lines and now Mini-Split copper line sets all out of the way and hidden from view and yet easy to access for installing and maintenance. Looking inside the entry door, the drawers on both sides of the Galley are 24” deep but the countertops are 32” so there is a nice space behind the drawers when they are closed. I could do this because Lance’s ambulance box is 8 feet/243cm wide on the outside and the finished inside width is about 7 1/2 ft/2.3m which allowed me to design both really deep drawers and countertops and still have lots of room for working in the Galley between the two countertops. I’m mentioning this because designing this space behind the drawers gives me the perfect place to run electrical cables, PEX water lines and now Mini-Split copper line sets all out of the way and hidden from view and yet easy to access for installing and maintenance. This is the space behind the bottom drawer on the Left side of the stairs as you enter and I drilled a 2” hole through the vinyl flooring, insulation and aluminium floor of the box. The Pioneer unit came with the white PVC insert to protect the copper line set and the white cable is the 240VAC power and the black is the communication cable between the two halves of the Mini-Split. Up above I drilled two overlapping holes in the solid Acrylic countertop, which is fabulous stuff to work with BTW, and ran the electric cables and copper line sets through this. The copper lines in the interior evaporator unit come permanently fitted and they ended up just above the countertop height so I cut the new copper lines and installed new flare nuts that allowed me to connect them here and then run down into the compressor/condenser unit under the floor. The upper parts of the line sets gets covered with this black EPDM insulation and the corrugated clear hose is where the condensation produced by the evaporator drains out and down through the floor onto the road below. To protect and hide all these lines and cords I built a small vertical connector between the countertop and the overhead cabinet you can just see at the very top of this photo. The sides will soon be fitted with Cherry panels same as all the fronts of the doors and drawers that will be the topic of several other future posts. I will maybe guild some small shelves into this space to make it otherwise useful but for now it plays its primary role of protecting all these electrical cords and copper lines. Most importantly, Razz and Zoe use this new little upper step for their water bowl and so they give this new addition two paws up!
It’s been a bit cold the past few days with highs in the day around 10C/50F and brrrrrrrr as low as 4C/40F at night so we Three Pupsketeers have been really appreciating how well the heating function of the Mini-Split has kept us keeping us nice and comfy.
Well, that’s going to do it for this week but at least I’ve started to catch up with all those months of no updates on the progress with Lance and hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks for joining the journey here and don’t hesitate to leave your comments and questions in the Join the Discussion box below.
See you next week which will be Thanksgiving weekend for all my American friends and family.
We had a fabulous week in Portland Maine for my niece Julia’s wedding on June 21st and several days catching up with family and friends who were in attendance, which is where I left off in last week’s update which if you have not read yet is here; “Life is what happens while making other plans!”.
From there we started our trek back to our place on Saturna Island BC for the rest of the summer and then most recently back down to our place near Searchlight down in the southern tip of Nevada and that’s what I’m going to do my best to summarize in this week’s update. As you can see in this map of all our travels (click to enlarge any photo), that’s a LOT of miles or clicks 17,250 km/10,720 miles to be exact, so it will be a bit of a whirlwind marathon.
So Get comfy and here we go ………………………..
Here’s the map of our travels after we left Portland and made our way back to Saturna Island.
On June 24th, after saying goodbye to the bride and groom and all our friends and family gathered in Portland ME, the four of us (Christine, Zoe, Razz + I) got back on the road heading north up the coast of Maine and crossed into Canada and the province of New Brunswick. While Lance was far from finished and a bit “Spartan” for living in shall we say, he served us very well the whole trip and I continued to work on the eXtremely long To Do list as time allowed on our travels. In next week’s update I’ll get back to covering the work I’ve done over the past months on Lance so stay tuned for that. This photo is taken looking aft with the two Galley countertops in the lower left and right and the L shaped Settee behind. The Queen bed is up in the ceiling thanks to the four linear actuators on each corner that lifts it up there each morning with the push of a button. More on all of this to come in future posts.
Back to our travels after the wedding, as many of you might know, I’m a Canadian Army Brat as my Dad served over forty years as a chef in the Service Corps and we moved to a new posting every 2-3 years. We were posted to northern Germany from 1957-59 and returned from there to Camp Gagetown near Oromocto in New Brunswick where we lived in the house you see behind me here in the PMQ’s (Permanent Married Quarters) on the Base. Other than the new siding covering up the original red brick I was absolutely blown away to find that everything was exactly how I had remembered it when we left in 1961. Unless they close down, things on Canadian military bases don’t change much. So it was great fun to go back there for the first time in all those years since and be able to regale Christine in all the misadventures I had as a young boy. This was also the home that my brother Bruce had come home to when he was born so there were a lot of memories here. I had gone on to be a shop teacher at the High School on the Canadian jet fighter base in Baden Baden Germany from 1980-84 and I have retained very close friendships with many of the awemazing teachers who were there during these years. Christine had also done here share of traveling both growing up and in her adult years and as a result we both had a lot of friends all across the US and Canada, many of whom we visited on this latest trip and our routing was largely driven by all those the “mooch docking” we did as we drove Lance from one set of dear friends to the next. You’d have thought this would be high season and very busy but for most of our trip it often seemed like we were the only ones on the roads and places we camped out in Lance. Like the one you see on the left looking out the side door of Lance one on our way from Gagetown over to the province of Prince Edward Island or PEI.
I had been in touch with one set of dear friends from my days in Germany, Tony & Anna, and they had said that Tony was giving a talk at a Poet’s Conference at the University of Charlottetown on PEI, another spot I had not been back to since the 50’s. Since then they had put in the Confederation Bridge from the East end of New Brunswick over to PEI so that was a whole new experience for all of us driving over to PEI rather than on a ferry.
After meeting up with Anna and Tony at the University, we spent a few more days camping at the PEI National Park and exploring more of the island. One stop was here at Richards, a famous local spot for VERY fresh fish & chips. ……………….. and a beer with a view for my thirsty Bride while we waited for our fish & chips to arrive. For a change of pace and a different experience, we decided to take the ferry off of PEI and over to our next province on the itinerary; Nova Scotia.
More Moochdocking (parking in the driveways of your friends) with teaching friends from Germany, Blaine & Jill MacDonald, one of the three sets of friends we had in different spots in Nova Scotia. And you can’t be in Nova Scotia and not have a good lobster feed right? And BOY, did Mike and Cindy ever treat us to a feast with the lobster we picked up with them earlier that day. By now it was the July 1st Canada Day holiday which we were fortunate enough to have another great moochdocking spot with Christine’s sailing friends Dick & Deb who were both retired Canada Coast Guard Captains. On to yet another horribly crowed camp spot on our way back through the north side of New Brunswick as we made our way over to Quebec City. Along the way tried out lots of different ways of finding great spots to live out of Lance and one of these was by using Harvest Hosts. As their web site puts it “Harvest Hosts is a network of farms, wineries, breweries & distilleries, golf courses, community hosts and more that invite RVers to stay overnight, giving Members safe, convenient, and unique places to stay during their travels”. Having paid our $100 annual membership fee we were able to find spots like this little out of the way winery in Ontario. Harvest Host sites only allow one or two RVs per night and no facilities which is a Goldilocks combo for Christine and I.
At the other end of the spectrum, sometimes you do just need to be a tourist and how could we pass by Niagara Falls for a quick visit as we travelled westward across Ontario.
Christine had never been so it was even move special for the both of us and well worth the stop. Onward to the west side of Ontario in Kingsville on the north side of Lake Erie with Detroit just across the river to the west, where we stopped in for an extended stay with our longtime friends who are more like family, the Alonso Clan. I am honoured to be the godfather of their four children and Christine knows them eXtremely well too so it was a very special stop after not seeing several of them for some time. John’s Dad Juan is an eXtremely skilled craftsman of many trades with an eXtremely good selection of every tool and machine known to man which he kindly shared with me and helped me finally build this prototype table top for the settee in Lance. It was a much appreciated replacement to the temporary loose piece of plywood we had been using for a table up to that point and has its own electric pedestal so just like the bed it too goes up and down from dining table to coffee table height or all the way down to create a lower bed for infrequent guests. More on all this in upcoming posts so back on the road again for now…… We both love to live for eXperiences an this was our next one. After a quick dip down across the border to Valparaiso Indiana for a quick visit with Christine’s brother Steve & Susan, we decided to backtrack east a bit for an experience that Christine had found taking a ferry across the middle of Lake Michigan. Click to enlarge and read that this is not just any ole ferry, this is the last remaining coal fired steam driven public ferry in existence. And my oh my was it ever an experience. One part of which was that in the photo above that is NOT us driving Lance OFF the ferry, this is one of the ferry crew members BACKING Lance onto the ferry, which was their requirement for EVERY vehicle going on that ferry! I could go on with more stories about that ferry ride but we need to keep driving onward …………. Off the ferry we headed due North and crossed the border back into Canada at the very south western corner of Ontario and headed West across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and into Alberta.
Another one of our Harvest Hosts stops was in the back of this great little out of the way restaurant where we had a great meal and evening before moving on. There is no fee for your stays at a Harvest Host site and instead you are encouraged to partake of whatever that host is selling from meals to wine. A fabulous deal in our opinion and we thoroughly enjoyed them all. As we made our way across Alberta we wanted to see more of the HUGE Dinosaur National Park. Several years earlier on one of our many cross country drives, we had visited a part of this park further west near Drumheller that had the truly awemazing Royal Tyrell Museum which we would consider a must see for anyone any where near the area. This time we wanted to explore more of the wilderness side of this sprawling National Park. Truly an other worldly type of place as you can see.
Middle of July and so once again the campsite were eXtremely overcrowded!! Of course this might have kept a few people away, but we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and will be back for more on another trip. Growing up I had spent many summers at my Uncle Roland’s farm just east of Calgary which my cousin Dale now runs and is always extremely generous with his time and knowledge every time we stop in on one of our trips. It is just SO fascinating having a modern day farmer take you on tours of his farm answering the litany of questions we always have for him and being in awe of the advanced tech that has become the norm for running a family farm these days.
Making our way across the Rockies through Banff and into BC, we dipped South a bit to take the ferry that is part of the Trans Canada Highway to Ainsworth. On one of our first cross country tours not long after we had met, we had been snowed in there for three days after a record snow fall. Much warmer weather this time and we also stopped in for a dip in the Ainsworth Hot Springs. However this was all easily upstaged by our overnight free camping spot just a few miles north of Ainsworth at Fletcher Creek Falls.
Just stunning to see.
Oh, and the falls weren’t bad either! We had several stops ahead to see friends in Vernon and Salmon Arm but the night before we stopped in at a brand new Harvest Host that was a working ranch. In spite of being very new and still a work in progress they treated us to an evening BBQ with their family. With these views out over the valley for our early morning coffee. And the leader of the pack and our new BFF donkey “Mitch”. Inching ever closer to our far western destination on Saturna Island, we were invited in for an overnight visit by our dear friends Rick, Sherry and son Colin at their family property on Gambier Island just north of Vancouver. How could we say no?!!! During our conversations Colin wanted to show me what he had done with a 125 year old Cherry tree that had fallen down in a big storm several years ago. Colin is an eXtremely talented and self sufficient young man and he had a fashioned his own mill and used it to cut this enormous Cherry tree into these 2+ inch thick slabs. Very impressive!
In ensuing conversations I had mentioned that I was on the hunt for some nice hardwood I could use as both solid edging and veneer on all the doors and drawer fronts in Lance and Colin thought, quite rightly, that this Cherry would be ideal for the job and that I just HAD to take it with me! Everyone pitched in and we managed to move these planks down to the dock and onto Rick’s boat as this is the only way on/off Gambier. Back over on the mainland Rick helped me load it into Lance and in some future posts I’ll take you through what has happened to this magnificent wood since. For now I just want to say THANK YOU! to Colin and Rick for their incredible generosity. The next day, August 2nd, we were back on the road, onto some more ferries and just like that, Lance (and us) were back where we had started months earlier at our little sanctuary “Ravens Ridge” on Saturna Island. While there, Christine had heard that a local couple had started up a business renting some very capable eBikes which they delivered to you wherever you wanted. So they dropped off these two in the morning and we spent the rest of the day exploring spots on Saturna such as this favorite at the top of Mount Warburton, one of the highest spots in all the Gulf Islands and literally in our back yard. After making the VERY steep climb up the mountain we wanted to push the bikes harder and see what they were capable of so we headed down and back up another even steeper set of climbs over to the Feral Goat Bistro at Sage Hayward Winery and enjoyed THIS delicious spread along with some flights of wine. We both love eggs Benedict and had many of them for breakfasts on this trip but still enjoyed making my own version once we were back home. Christine was happy to be reunited with one of the green frogs that seems to have adopted us. We were going to stay on Saturna to enjoy the warmer weather of summer there before heading back down to Nevada when things cooled down and so a few days after we got back I flew down to Vegas to go pick up “Totu” our 2006 Toyota Tundra truck and drive him back up to Saturna so that we had more than Lance for transportation for the next few months. I had a fabulous drive making my way over to Pacific Coast Highway on roads I’d not tried before and
1520 miles, 2446km later I was back on Saturna. This is already getting long so I’ll condense the rest of our travels since then and just say that we had a wonderful few months on Saturna.
Having friends ……… …….. and more friends ……
….. and family over and just enjoying this magical spot on the planet.
But soon enough it did start getting chillier and some members of the family had to break out their Canadiana winter weather clothes and it was time for us to pack up and start our migration south for the winter. We needed to get both vehicles down to Nevada so Christine drove Totu and I drove Lance and we found some more new ways to get from Saturna to Searchlight. This time we took the ferry out of Victoria over to Port Angeles, down the PCH and then west along the north or California on fabulous Hwy 36 that I had found on my drive up with Totu a few months previous. It was a truly wonderful Summer and Fall for all of us and we are now settling back into life here on our winter base at Road Runner Ranch, out in the BLM lands just north of Searchlight NV. Christine has just come back from a very eXciting writers conference in Las Vegas all this past week and she will soon be flying off to Ft. Lauderdale to enjoy American Thanksgiving getting in some much needed Gramma time with our Grandson Liam who just turned TEN a few days ago!!
Meanwhile, I’m busy working away at getting Lance’s transformation more and more complete and ready for our retreat to warmer weather down in Baja Mexico for the winter months in the new year. We’re delighted to be spending the Xmas week down in the LA area with equally fast growing Granddaughters Brynn and Blair and so I’ve got my work cut out for me to get Lance MUCH more completed and ready for our next “test drives”.
I’ll leave it at that for today and next week I’ll get back to covering the work I’ve done on Lance since the last of those kinds of updates back in May.
My sympathies and thanks to those of you who have endured and made it this far and please do add any questions or comments in the “Join the Discussion” box below.
Thanks and hope you’ll be back for more next week!
Back on May 5th I ended my last post here by saying “I will do my best to get out another update before we start on our newest adventure heading to the East Coast and back.”
Hmmmmm, given that this is now the 3rd of November, I think we can safely say that has turned out to be an eXtreme failure! And I do sincerely apologize for any angst or concern this may have caused some of you. However I’ll do my best here to rectify the situation by finally making some time to put together this update, which I will again endeavor to be the first of many more to come.
The short answer to the questions many of you sent asking along the lines of “What’s been happening?!?!” is in the title of this long delayed update and a favorite quote of mine if that wasn’t already painfully obvious.
BTW, that quote of ‘Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans’ is widely remembered as John Lennon’s, thanks to his 1980 song Beautiful Boy. But the phrase first appeared decades earlier, in a 1957 Reader’s Digest piece by Allen Saunders. Lennon gave it wings, but Saunders gave it birth and I’ll just say thanks to them both.
“Life” in my case and Christine’s is lived based on what we refer to as “The No Plan Plan” and is one of constant curiosity and eXploration. These have been traits for both of us for most of our lives and the root of what led us both to become single handed sailors for so many years before our serendipitous meeting back on November 22, 2013 happily turned us into double handed sailors, lovers and life partners on sv Learnativity, mv Möbius and now the XRV Lance.
For those who may not know it or for those interested in a repeat telling of the whole story of how we came to merge our single handed lives into one, you can find all the details in my previous post several years ago “The simple comment that Changed My Life Forever Better”
But I digress………………… (some things never change no matter how long you wait) Both of those traits of endless curiosity and living on The No Plan Plan also helps explain the eXtreme delay in getting this new new update posted for you. Having been so long and with SO much having happened since that last update I think I’ll tackle this the same way as one would do trying to eat an elephant; one bite at a time! My intent then is to start by answering as best I can, some of those questions of “What’s been happening?!?” and “Why not updates for over six months?!!?” by providing a few details as context as to why I simply have not had any time to write any updates since I left off back on May 5th. Suffice it to say my first few posts will be travelogues indeed as since that last update, we have put on over 20,000 km / 12,500 miles on Lance’s first “test drive”.
All this driving time was also interspersed with visiting friends and family all across the US and Canada and it simply did not leave ANY time for writing blog post updates. Hope you can understand and I do sincerely appreciate your eXtreme patience with me for those of you still following along after all this time.
My intent with today’s blog is to provide you with a bit more detail on the four different routes we drove to make what turned out to be a giant counterclockwise loop from Road Runner Ranch (our place here in Searchlight NV) across to the East Cost of the US, up into the Maritime provinces in Canada, back across Canada to RavensRidge on Saturna Island and most recently our move with both Lance and Totu (our 2006 Toyota Tundra pickup) from Saturna back to Searchlight. So get a comfy seat and your beverage of choice and come along for the first leg of the “test drive” as we make our way from Searchlight to Portland Maine in time for Julia’s wedding on June 21st.
June 10-20, 2025 Searchlight NV to Portland ME 5021km/3120 miles
Picking up where I left off in the last post in May, we both had our noses pressed hard against our individual grindstones; Christine finishing the manuscript for her upcoming new novel and me pushing to get Lance further along with his transformation into a livable XRV. We had two hard deadlines to meet;
1. Get Christine’s manuscript sent off to the Developmental Editor in England she has hired
2. Be in Portland Maine in time to attend the wedding of my niece Julia on June 21st.
Oblivious that we had apparently become delirious from the stress and strain of these rapidly approaching deadlines “one of us” had the brilliant idea that driving rather than flying to Portland for Julia’s wedding was the perfect opportunity to take Lance on his “Maiden voyage” to see how well our designs would work out in the real world and return with all the new ideas for improvements and edits to the build. This iterative approach has been a common method for us with our projects such as when we were finishing Mobius and decided to spend a year cruising around the Turkish coasts on extended sea trials to work out the bugs and find out what was working well, what was not and what changes we wanted to make before truly setting off on the high seas.
These cross country driving trips were also in keeping with our past as over the years while we were out sailing the world, we would fly back and taken several similar large road trips all across the US and Canada in rented vehicles we outfitted to be mini RV’s. We are “bi-coastal Grandparents” with two Granddaughters in the LA area and a Grandson in Ft. Lauderdale and our son Skyler up in Vancouver BC. And dear friends and family literally spread out all across both countries and many more.
So I committed to getting Lance to the point of having a comfortable bed to sleep on, counters and cooktops to prep meals with and seating to eat along the way. So was born the agreement that I would get Lance as close as possible to this stage and as soon as Christine hit the button to send her manuscript through the ether to the editor in England we would fire up Lance and hit the road. As time ticked away Christine set a deadline to send off her manuscript the morning of June 10th and the race was on to be on the road by 10 o’clock on the 10th.
Portland Maine here we come!
Well, almost!
A few days before the 10th I had taken Lance into Vegas to put new front steering tires on him. All six tires (duals on the rear axle) still had a pretty good amount of tread on them but for a bit of added confidence and safety putting on a new set of steering tires was a good idea and this also gave me the chance to take Lance out on the highway for the approximately 160 mile round trip up to Vegas and back after he had been sitting here on RoadRunner Ranch for almost six months. Then after the wedding we could take advantage of New Hampshire not having any sales tax to buy the four new tires for the rear axle and give Lance new shoes all the way around for the rest of our marathon test drive up the East coast into the Maritime provinces and across Canada back to the Best Coast and our place on Saturna Island. That all worked out well as you can see as I jump the timeline a bit to June 19th when we put on the four new rear tires.
Meanwhile, back to the morning of June 10th, as Christine was putting the finishing touches on the draft manuscript of her new book getting it ready to sent off, I went out to finish stowing everything we had loaded into Lance for the big test drive out to Julia’s wedding. Of course our co-pilots, Razz and Zoe were even more eXcited and always ready to hit the road.
Just before 10am I fired him up in prep for leaving but turns out he wasn’t going anywhere as the air compressor had decided to stop working. Lance has air brakes and after the air pressure in his 3 tanks gets below about 90 PSI, all the brakes go ON and can’t be taking off until they get back to their topped up pressure of 125PSI.
I informed Christine of this new twist in the plot of my own novel and told her she had a bit more time if she wanted to send off her manuscript.
I had been having some problems previously with the air compressor not cooperating but had always got it going but it took me the better part of the day to find THIS problem with a split in the rubber elbow Not a stock part and too late to get one shipped in so MacGyver time it was.
A a bit of self amalgamating tape (the yellow stuff) and some zip ties and it was time to fire up Lance again and see if this had fixed the problem and the compressor was filling up the air tanks.
It was! It was late by now but we figured it would be psychologically best for us to still leave and put in a few miles just so we had officially started the trip. The weather had been getting hotter and hotter with daytime temps in the low 40’sC well over 100F but being in this dessert area it cools down nicely at night and makes for pleasant sleeping and evening drives.
Laughlin Nevada is about 60 miles south of us right on the banks of the Colorado River and we had been several times so I reminded Christine that I had said we’d leave at “10 on the 10th” but had conveniently left off the AM/PM detail!
And so it was that at 22:00 hours on June 10th, we pulled out of RoadRunner Ranch and headed south on Hwy 95 to Laughlin.
Portland here we come!
Well, almost.
Lance goes to Laughlin
We hadn’t eaten yet so we decided to go to the In-N-Out Burger place in Laughlin and go camp out on the river to enjoy our last night in Nevada for awhile. However, Laughlin sits about 3800 feet lower than our place near Searchlight which we were reminded of as the night time temperatures continued to rise the whole way there and turned out that Laughlin had set a new record that day of 116F/47C!
Just after midnight now and with fresh piping hot burgers and fries the night had cooled down to a mere 112F/42C so we were headed for the banks of the Colorado River less than a mile away as quick as we could. We almost made it to the intersection at the end of Casino Boulevard where we would turn Right down to the river when the low air pressure alarm when off! Drat! Apparently that MacGyver fix hadn’t quite done the job.
I knew we had less than a minute before the pressure would drop below 90psi and the brakes would all come ON so I pulled over into the right hand turn lane at the end of Casino Drive where there is a big boat launching ramp into the river. Just got into that turn lane when the brakes came on. Guess what dear!? This is home for the night!
I’ll skip most of the gory details and just say that I was able to go buy a cordless compressor and get enough air in the tanks to move Lance into that boat launch ramp parking spot that had been freshly paved. It took another two days to finally get back on the road again that involved a rental car to make a trip up to Vegas to get a new cylinder head to rebuild the compressor. Oh, and did I mention that it set a new record of 117F the next day.
My Brilliant Beautiful Bride knew what what we needed to cool down and survive was ELEVATION so once again at 22:00 hours on the 12th Lance was again ready to roll and we headed out of Laughlin bound for Flagstaff Arizona and quickly climbed up to over 4000 ft where we found an ideal little truck stop just after midnight where it was now under 70F/21C and all four of us (Zoe & Razz were along of course) had a much needed and much cooler sleep. By the next night we had climbed up over 8000ft and when we woke up that morning it was a very chilly 34F/1C so as Christine knew, elevation easily solved our high temp problem.
They’re going to get married and we ARE going to be there!
We were now a bit behind schedule so we had relatively full days of driving but enjoyed ever mile of it as the weather and the geography changed as we made our way to Portland for the wedding for sure this time! You can check out that map above (click to enlarge any photo) and see our route if you’re interested. And we still had enough time to get the four new tires as we passed through sales tax free Concord New Hampshire.
Most importantly though, we arrived in Portland the morning of June 20th with plenty of time to spare, by my standards at least and enjoyed the evening with all the other friends and family there for the big day tomorrow. It was very windy that night but we awoke to a beautiful sunny Saturday and Ben & Julia had perfect weather for their outdoor afternoon wedding. Julia is my sisters daughter and so I may be a wee bit biased but THAT is a Beautiful Bride! And they had the perfect backdrop of the inner harbour that included some gorgeous schooners and tall ships for that extra touch. Seems like a pretty ideal ending to this first leg of our test drive in Lance and I’ll be back in MUCH less than six months with the next three legs of this eXtremely wonderful set of adventures we had.
For those interested in the build of Lance I have continued to make quite a bit of progress since I left off back in May, both along the way of those routes and in the time we had at RavensRidge on Saturna. I think I will perhaps change from doing posts that are chronological and instead cover specific parts of the build such as plumbing, electrical, interior cabinetry, etc. Let me know what you think of that change and I’ll do my best to get back to posting a new update every week of so.
Lastly, my sincere thanks for your patience and my apologies for keeping you waiting and somewhat concerned for so long.
See you here again soon and remember you can add any questions, comments or suggestions in the “Join the Discussion” at the bottom of each post.
For those interested in the details, this is the make and model Mini-Split we decided on. It is a 9k BTU capacity “Pioneer Diamante Ultra” that is one of the most efficient models they make rated at 23.5 SEER for those who know that system. These type of two part aircon/heating systems are referred to as Mini-Splits because they consist of two parts; the outside condenser/compressor and the inside air handler evaporator. 
If you check out the basic features here this model provides both cooling in up to 131F/55C outside temps as well as heating when it gets down to from –13F/-25C. 9000 BTU is more than we need but the smallest model I could find so just means it won’t take much run time to keep the inside of the “Hab” as we have come to call the Habitat or Box or living quarters in Lance, just the right temperature in both hot and cold climates. 
I will cover this in a later blog post but just FYI, in addition to the Mini-Split we will also have a diesel fired boiler that will heats the Glycol solution that flows through a network of PEX tubing in the floor as well as heat for two floor mounted air/glycol heat exchangers (mini radiators) so that when we head up to the Arctic, possibly this summer, we’ll stay nice and toasty. And this boiler also provides all our domestic hot water DHW for sinks and showers so stay tuned for that update in a few weeks. 
Back to the Mini-Split install, this is the wall mounted interior evaporator half of the system and I mounted this Air Handler above the entry door on the front passenger side of the Hab. Works out well as you can see being almost the same width as the door. There are moving louvers with one large one running across the bottom that you can see partially open here that distributes the cold/hot air up/down vertically and then inside are a set of other smaller louvers that move back and forth sideways and help move the air left and right. So this location works out very well for the heating/cooling of the interior air and yet keeps it from blowing directly on us when we are at the Settee or in bed. 
As you might have noticed in the earlier photos, I had to cut away part of the upper stair in the entry to fit this top right corner of the exterior half or condenser/compressor. Once I had this all solidly bolted in place to the frame of the Hab underneath (see that May post for details if you’re curious) I finished it off by building a little “cage” using extruded aluminium and some aluminium diamond plate that I had left over from cutting out some of the original ambulance cabinetry. Also added some insulation to keep the other heat/cold from getting into the Hab. 
The 6mm diamond plate slid nicely into the T-slot grooves of the extruded Aluminium or XAL as you can see here. 
All these interlocked plates and XAL turned this into somewhat of an Origami project as I needed to be able to slide some of those plates out to get inside to connect the wiring and refrigerant lines but I was quite pleased with the way it turned out in the end and still functioned well as our entry stairs. 
I chose the 240V model as it is a wee bit more efficient than the 120V versions and I designed our AC system that I’ll cover in more detail in a future post, to be a Split Phase system so it provides both 120 and 240 Volt power. 
Next part of the install was to make up some custom copper line sets that connect the two parts and transfer the refrigerant between the exterior condenser and the interior evaporator. These copper tubes are well insulated to help with efficiency and that’s the white covering you see here.
Looking inside the entry door, the drawers on both sides of the Galley are 24” deep but the countertops are 32” so there is a nice space behind the drawers when they are closed. 
This is the space behind the bottom drawer on the Left side of the stairs as you enter and I drilled a 2” hole through the vinyl flooring, insulation and aluminium floor of the box. The Pioneer unit came with the white PVC insert to protect the copper line set and the white cable is the 240VAC power and the black is the communication cable between the two halves of the Mini-Split. 
Up above I drilled two overlapping holes in the solid Acrylic countertop, which is fabulous stuff to work with BTW, and ran the electric cables and copper line sets through this. The copper lines in the interior evaporator unit come permanently fitted and they ended up just above the countertop height so I cut the new copper lines and installed new flare nuts that allowed me to connect them here and then run down into the compressor/condenser unit under the floor. 
The upper parts of the line sets gets covered with this black EPDM insulation and the corrugated clear hose is where the condensation produced by the evaporator drains out and down through the floor onto the road below. 
To protect and hide all these lines and cords I built a small vertical connector between the countertop and the overhead cabinet you can just see at the very top of this photo. The sides will soon be fitted with Cherry panels same as all the fronts of the doors and drawers that will be the topic of several other future posts. 
I will maybe guild some small shelves into this space to make it otherwise useful but for now it plays its primary role of protecting all these electrical cords and copper lines. 
Most importantly, Razz and Zoe use this new little upper step for their water bowl and so they give this new addition two paws up!
Click to enlarge and read that this is not just any ole ferry, this is the last remaining coal fired steam driven public ferry in existence. And my oh my was it ever an experience. One part of which was that in the photo above that is NOT us driving Lance OFF the ferry, this is one of the ferry crew members BACKING Lance onto the ferry, which was their requirement for EVERY vehicle going on that ferry! I could go on with more stories about that ferry ride but we need to keep driving onward …………. 
However this was all easily upstaged by our overnight free camping spot just a few miles north of Ainsworth at Fletcher Creek Falls.
After making the VERY steep climb up the mountain we wanted to push the bikes harder and see what they were capable of so we headed down and back up another even steeper set of climbs over to the Feral Goat Bistro at Sage Hayward Winery and enjoyed THIS delicious spread along with some flights of wine. 
We both love eggs Benedict and had many of them for breakfasts on this trip but still enjoyed making my own version once we were back home. 
I had a fabulous drive making my way over to Pacific Coast Highway on roads I’d not tried before and
This is already getting long so I’ll condense the rest of our travels since then and just say that we had a wonderful few months on Saturna. 
We needed to get both vehicles down to Nevada so Christine drove Totu and I drove Lance and we found some more new ways to get from Saturna to Searchlight. This time we took the ferry out of Victoria over to Port Angeles, down the PCH and then west along the north or California on fabulous Hwy 36 that I had found on my drive up with Totu a few months previous. 
It was a truly wonderful Summer and Fall for all of us and we are now settling back into life here on our winter base at Road Runner Ranch, out in the BLM lands just north of Searchlight NV. 
A few days before the 10th I had taken Lance into Vegas to put new front steering tires on him. All six tires (duals on the rear axle) still had a pretty good amount of tread on them but for a bit of added confidence and safety putting on a new set of steering tires was a good idea and this also gave me the chance to take Lance out on the highway for the approximately 160 mile round trip up to Vegas and back after he had been sitting here on RoadRunner Ranch for almost six months. 
Then after the wedding we could take advantage of New Hampshire not having any sales tax to buy the four new tires for the rear axle and give Lance new shoes all the way around for the rest of our marathon test drive up the East coast into the Maritime provinces and across Canada back to the Best Coast and our place on Saturna Island. 
That all worked out well as you can see as I jump the timeline a bit to June 19th when we put on the four new rear tires. 
Of course our co-pilots, Razz and Zoe were even more eXcited and always ready to hit the road. 
Not a stock part and too late to get one shipped in so MacGyver time it was.
It was very windy that night but we awoke to a beautiful sunny Saturday and Ben & Julia had perfect weather for their outdoor afternoon wedding. 
Julia is my sisters daughter and so I may be a wee bit biased but THAT is a Beautiful Bride! 
And they had the perfect backdrop of the inner harbour that included some gorgeous schooners and tall ships for that extra touch.
Recent Comments