Life is what happens while making other plans!
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.
Wayne
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