who's dumb enough to have an RV with only one propane tank ?.....that would be me.

click the pics, it's easier than squinting at tiny pictures.

My neighbors enjoying a beautiful sunrise boondocking on free Arizona trust lands.

Giant class A's all the way down to sleeping in there car, there's room for everyone on the public lands, and everyone is welcome because we all have one thing in common, were Nomads.... There's no place we call home, and leaving is what were known for.

Partly cloudy today, but still a beautiful day while living in the desert.

I was out of propane when I woke up this morning, which made my first job of the morning, like it or not, removing my empty tank and swapping it for the full one I carry with me, and that gives me a couple of weeks to find a place to fill my empty one. and that reminded me of the horrors of trying to live with one propane tank like I did when I had my Hallmark pop-up truck camper.

Looking back, I can't believe I would live in that camper for weeks without a spare propane tank. And yes, that's just as bad as it sounds when I would wake up in the morning with an empty propane tank, It meant no cooking or heating until I went someplace and filled the tank.

The little Hallmark pop-up camper had no room for two tanks, and this was back in the days before anyone could swap a tank at the grocery store like we can now. And to make matters worse, the propane tank in the Hallmark was horizontal, not the stand-up kind that everybody has now; there was no room in the Hallmark to put a normal stand-up tank. So It was common to have horizontal tanks in truck campers that were small without much space available.

So, I was faced with having a single propane tank in my camper. Places to refill propane tanks were hard to find, and some of those places refused to fill a horizontal tank because they didn't understand how they worked because most places had never even seen them. Horizontal tanks cost about three times what a normal stand-up tank costs so I didn't want to buy another one of the annoying things, so for years, I camped with one propane tank.

There were several times when I seriously regretted not having a spare tank, like one winter morning when I woke up in a state park in southern Colorado. It was 11 below zero, and I think the only thing that saved my life was the sun coming up and warming up the camper enough so I could run outside, start up the truck, turn on the heater in the truck, and then run back inside and get in bed which kept me from freezing until the truck warmed up.

I was a lot younger then, so I could get away with mistakes like that, but nowadays, I carry two propane tanks because I have determined that "toughing it out" is for the young and the dumb, not for people my age. My working rule of thumb nowadays is safety and comfort, which may be why boondocking doesn't seem uncomfortable to me because anything is better than living with one propane tank.

theboondork

A handful of cowboys and cowgirls having their picture taken, to prove they were actually at the End of Trail 2024.

This is what cowboys and cowgirls do best, sit around and relax.

I never got a chance to ask any of the shooters, but I've always wondered if firing that gun right next to a horses ear damages his hearing?

I thought this mounted shooter looked rather odd, and when I got close enough I could see that he's wearing the latest American G.I. helmet.... Well not actually the latest. The latest helmet which looks very similar to this one is still in the process of being issued to GIs, but this is still a very modern G.I. helmet so it didn't look like it really fit the cowboy theme that mounted shooters normally wear, so The governing body of mounted shooting must make an exception for head protection.

G.I. Helmets now days are designed to do all kinds of tricks and you can hang doodads all over it, but you still can't build a fire under it like the steel pots from my day, and make a cup of coffee.... Well, maybe once.