If You Can’t Take The Heat, Too Bad: Longmont, CO
18 June 2021
If I had known, I would’ve made other plans.
See, this was supposed to be a peaceful stay on quiet farmland north of town. We’d be boondocking again, just outside of Boulder where there’s lots to see. It’s our first Hipcamp stay, which is like Airbnb for campers where people rent out their property for camping. Colorado is impossibly busy with RVers this summer, and there’s practically nothing available, but we’re pretty good at boondocking so this seemed like it would work.
We did get one spectacular sunset before the heat set in.
The drive over I-70 takes focus, but it’s beautiful. I have no praise for the road quality, however. It was a rough ride!
We’re going to the Xscapers Convergence, an RVers rally, in Salida for the 4th of July, so we have some time to explore Colorado. Unfortunately, because we didn’t make our plans 9 months ago like all the other Colorado RVers, we’re sort of staying wherever we can get in. If I had known I’d have these weeks in the state, I’d probably see other things. But we’ll make the most of it.
Anyway, our spot in Longmont was actually really nice, and the host was a sweetheart. But the weather was not nice. It was awful. The worst heat wave in years swept into greater Denver just as we did, and it stayed all week.
RVing in extreme weather puts all your systems to the test, as we saw back in Mayhill during winter storm Uri. Now was our test of extreme heat, except this time we didn’t see it coming, and had no power pedestal to plug into. So we were about to lean real hard on our solar and generator setup.
It takes a lot of energy to warm an RV, but you can take advantage of propane’s excellent energy density by just burning it directly in your furnace. Burning it in the generator, as you must when cooling your RV, is not nearly so efficient. We can carry 17 gallons of propane, and the generator burns about a gallon an hour running the air conditioning. That’s a lot of trips to the propane fill.
On top of that, the generator, batteries, and inverter all have heat thresholds too, and they get hot and inefficient when pushing out lots of energy to run the AC. (At 130F the batteries cut off current, and everything shuts down. They hit that a lot faster than you’d think!) So we have heat from the weather, heat from running the ACs, and heat from our bodies, and moving all of that outside the RV fast enough to stay comfortable was a constant challenge. We can almost run 1 AC unit off the solar, but if we want enough in our batteries to last the night, we have to run the generator to charge them.
Kristin had the bright idea to cover all our windows in Reflectix, so we spent Monday cutting and fitting our windows with shiny bubble wrap. We also covered the outside of the skylights and kitchen roof vent in aluminum foil.The RV was a dark cave by the end of this effort, but it did feel cooler.
After a couple days of running off the batteries as long as we could stand it, then running the generator for 3-4 hours in the evening to try and cool down, we asked our hipcamp host and he helped us out with a very long extension cord, which we ran alllll the way across the field to our RV, letting us run 1 AC during the whole daytime without overheating or overdraining the batteries. Just that few hundred extra watts made it work! Should’ve gotten more solar panels I guess!
Even with the heat, we managed to fit in plenty of activities. We finally sold Kristin’s orange city bike, which we’ve been hauling on our bed for the last several months. It went to a college student who was shopping for that exact bike and happened to find us selling it, which makes me happy. On Tuesday Kristin and the kids went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, while I holed up at a coffee shop to work away from the heat. There’s an excellent library nearby, at which we spent many hours also escaping the heat. We had a tech come out to re-hang our microwave, which bounced off of its wall bracket from the terrible paving on I-70 over the mountains.
Friday we went into Boulder to see the city. Boulder’s cute and very much itself - a little college/mountain town with some money. We stopped at a trampoline center on the way to give the kids a chance to stretch their legs someplace relatively cool, but the prettiest stop was at the Dushanbe Teahouse. Sadly we couldn’t sit down and enjoy a meal, but we did get some tea to go that was super good. (Their Boulder Breakfast is absolutely divine.) We’d like to go back to Boulder, there’s a lot to explore and do in this area, but between the heat and the timing it didn’t work out this year.
Saturday, our travel day, was quite eventful! The family we met in Silt happens to own a quarter horse named Red. Red is stabled just south of Longmont, and they generously offered to let the kids ride him! Something like that doesn’t come along every day. We have a short travel day - just going south across Denver to Larkspur - so Kristin and the kids went to meet the owner and see Red in the morning while I readied for travel. Red is a wonderful horse and, having been on a couple for-pay horse rides on this trip, it was special to see how an actual horse owner does it. The chores, the care routine, and the riding are all very different when it’s your horse, not one that’s there to earn tourist money.
We headed out in the afternoon, planning to stop at a Cabela’s on the way to dump the tanks. We got there and it started to rain, and we couldn’t find the dump station. Poor Kristin walked all the way around the store looking for it, and it wasn’t until she was thoroughly soaked that a close reading of the Google reviews showed that they had closed it. There was no other dump station between there and Larkspur, so we said forget it, we’ll just dump it when we get there. This fruitless stop turned out to be a blessing in disguise, however, as when we were coming out of the parking lot the rain turned into a downpour, then a hailstorm! Had we skipped this stop we would’ve been on the freeway when this hit, instead we got to wait safely in the parking lot.
The rest of the drive was uneventful, as the storm passed and we took our heavier-than-usual home to the park in Larkspur, where a surprise awaits the kids.
