Bighorn National Forest, Wyoming

What a difference a few days make! We are on the way to getting some fixes together for each of the various issues that have risen with our camping set-up.

Yesterday the fantastically friendly and capable folks at the McKie Ford dealership in Rapid City, SD, replaced the motor in our passenger window and one hour later we were on our way!

Devil’s tower national monument

We have not been able to get our expensive diesel stove to work correctly. Since we’ve been told that the only people that could fix it properly are either in Germany or in Northern California, we made decision to just buy a propane camping stove to tide us over until later this year when we plan to drive through Northern California on our way to Mexico.

It’s true that the manufacturers don’t recommend using propane inside of a camper, but since just about every RV has a propane stove in it, we believe that it comes down to having proper venting. Our precautions are to open lots of windows, turn on our Fantastic Fan ventilation system, and make sure that our carbon monoxide detector is working.

The $100 solution

Tomorrow we are meeting up with Witt’s parents to offload our bikes and related gear. We figure that will reduce our load by about 100 lbs (most of which is stored higher the center of gravity of our van) so we expect that’ll get us closer to the max gross vehicle weight (GVW) and maybe we’ll see an improvement in gas mileage too!

We will be sad to lose the use of our bikes, but when we take all factors into consideration (including what a pain it is to open the back of the van when we have our bikes on the rack) we know that it’s the right decision.

So we now have a fix (or workaround) for all of our current van issues. We also have a plan for bug screens for our side and back doors. We have some of the materials already and Witt’s parents are bringing up some more for us (via stops at Hobby Lobby and the Bass Pro Shop).

Our next stop: Yellowstone National Park!