I've been trying to figure out where to put the cooling fans in Lance's refrigerator where they will be the most effective. And remember, I'm not talking about inside the refrigerator box; I'm talking about the actual working parts that you access from outside the camper.

The simplest place to get to is the pilot light area of the refrigerator on Lance's outside wall, and that's also the easiest place to put some fans. The refrigerator vent on the roof is harder to deal with, but it looks like it would be the best place to put the fans for the most effective cooling.

So after thinking about this conundrum for a while, which involved a great deal of thinking and relaxing, and sometimes relaxing without thinking, I've concluded that to get the most benefit from the cooling fans, I need to take off the roof vent and the screening that keeps out the bugs, and install two computer fans in the vent.

I was trying to avoid this because removing the screen looked like it would be pretty annoying since it still had all the factory caulking on it to the point that I couldn't even see the screws holding it down. And, unfortunately, past experience has shown me that it's held down with a whole lot of screws.

But I managed to get the mess apart without falling off the roof, and tomorrow after I've recuperated from the day's work, I will scrape off the old caulking and clean the parts up so they can be re-caulked without leaking.

This job cut deeply into my relaxing time, and normally I would stick with the old adage, "A job worth doing is worth hiring somebody else to do it," but in this case, I decided to do it myself despite the fact that the day was hot, and being up on the roof was even hotter, especially when I could've stayed in my easy chair still thinking about how to avoid this job altogether.

Theboondork

A happy, fluffy, little squirrel, also known as a tree rat,  enjoying the good life in Colorado

This is the cover over the refrigerator roof vent laying on one of the solar panels. This is what keeps the rain out of the refrigerator vent.

Here is the bug screen that's under the roof vent cover. It was held down with about 25 screws, each one entombed in 11-year-old caulking which did not give up its long-held location without a fight.

This is the roof vent itself, you can see some of the cooling fins inside the vent. These fins are where I want to put the fans to suck the hot air up and out of the roof vent.

This is the lower part of the refrigerator that's on the wall of the Lance. This would've been an easier place for me to deal with, but there's not enough room to get the fans to blow the air where I want. But if fans in the roof don't work as well as I hope, then I will put a couple of fans down here.

I went to the hardware store this morning. I've been working on some electrical stuff in the Lance and needed a few bits and pieces. And I needed to get a propane tank refilled.

At the store was a herd of Cub Scouts outside waiting to pounce on everybody entering the store. And when I went to the Safeway across the street, it to had Cub Scouts hovering outside the door.

I have a hard time saying no to Cub Scouts holding out their grubby little hands begging for money, but they were trying to sell a very small bag of popcorn for $20. I gave them a three-dollar donation, which is all the cash I carry in my wallet, but $20 for a small bag of popcorn is almost what I would pay at the movies for a small bag of popcorn. Even though I'm a sucker for the Scouts, I'm not a big enough sucker to pay movie prices for popcorn.

Going into Safeway and explaining to the scrum of Cub Scouts at the door that I gave at the office, it appeared that at least one of the Cub Scouts looked suspiciously like a girl. But, of course, I couldn't be sure, and one doesn't mention something like that. In less, one wants to be pummeled to death by a flock of Scouts, but he/she wore a Cub Scout uniform and had long hair tied in ribbons.

I didn't delve any deeper into the situation, but it made me curious about what happened to the Girl Scouts and those delicious Girl Scout cookies that I was happy to pay $20 for.

Theboondork

Old buildings in Central City, Colorado. That sure is some shaky looking cribbing holding that little building up.

Grasshopper on a Rose in the yard. Grasshoppers are more complicated critters than you might imagine. They're fully armored, they can jump a long way, they can even fly. And somehow they manage to do all that on a diet of grass, and a brain no bigger than the head of a pin... My brain is twice that size and I can't do any of that stuff.... Maybe I need to eat more grass.

The days appear to be flying by, and it seems to take me longer and longer to accomplish anything; that could be because the days are so short, but more than likely, because I'm so lazy.

I'm getting down to very few things I want to accomplish in the Lance, and it's mostly things I've been putting off because I'm not looking forward to doing them. But the thing that concerns me the most is getting the things I need in the Lance and finding a place to put it all without making the Lance too heavy for my truck to carry, and what constitutes "too heavy to carry" is a number I'm just guessing at.

I had the truck and Arctic Fox weighed by the Escapees Smartweigh guys at Congress Arizona, which I understand they don't do any more at the escapees RV Park in Congress, and the weight in the truck's bed was about 2600 pounds, so I know the truck has carried that much weight around for a while. The factory weight of the empty Lance is 2100 pounds, so I figure that gives me about 500 pounds of junk I can carry before I am in new and possibly dangerous territory.

Now I know that I probably shouldn't even be carrying that much weight, but I have yet to run into anybody with a truck camper that wasn't wildly overloaded, and yet they were still able to waddle down the road. So I figure it's like everything else in American life today, the factory decides what weight the truck can carry, and their lawyers make them cut that back by 25% to protect the company.

So I'm not going to worry too much about weight because I want the Lance as light as possible so I don't lose any mobility and safety that I need for boondocking. And I don't need anywhere near the amount of stuff I've carried in the Arctic Fox all this time.

Theboondork

One of the campgrounds at Rocky Mountain National Park. It looked to me like the campgrounds at the Park are old and very few of the sites are suitable for the size of modern RVs, you might be able to get your trailer into the site but then there's very little room for your truck and it ends up sticking out into the road, making driving through the campground more like an obstacle course experience.