Blue View - Blanche’s Latest Upgrades

There was a whirlwind of activity on Blanche over the last few weeks prior to our departure to Alaska. We had a long list of things we wanted to add or improve on and limited time in which to get them done. As our departure deadline approached, we went into crunch mode, meaning shortened nap times and working on the weekends. I know that sounds extreme, but as the old saying goes, drastic times call for drastic measures. Here’s what we got done…

Mule Bags

These are soft-sided cabinets designed specifically to fit a Promaster, Transit or Sprinter. Van walls are not square and don’t form a right angle with the ceiling, so most cabinets don’t fit. Blue, our first van, had curved walls, and I spent a couple weeks building custom cabinets for him. I originally expected to spend a similar amount of time building cabinets for Blanche, but these took me a total of about two hours to install. We discovered them when we were looking at another DIY upfit on a Mercedes Sprinter in Maine last summer. Our new Mule Bags are much lighter than our previous cabinets, and the soft sides are more forgiving when I bump into them with my head. They have a zillion little net pouches and elastic hooks for storing miscellaneous stuff like glasses, bedside meds, flashlights, charging cords, water bottles, iPads, and phones. We love them!

Diesel Heater

We spent eighteen winters with no heating aboard Nine of Cups. Most of those winters were in nice warm places like Cape Town or Ecuador, while some were uncomfortable but tolerable, like the ones we spent in New Zealand and Tasmania. A few, however, were more on the miserable side like our two winters in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. As we shivered away, enduring those long winter evenings, we swore we’d add a heater before venturing to the high latitudes again. But then, when we were sweating away in a warm latitude the next summer, we’d procrastinate and never quite got around to adding one.

Blanche, like most all vehicles, has a heater driven by the engine that heats the front up nicely when we’re driving, but only when the engine is running. Since we’re heading to Alaska via the Pacific Northwest and Canada quite early in the season, we expect we’ll be camping in a lot of cold, wet weather. Remembering those cold nights on Cups, adding a heater moved up on the priority list, and was one of the last things completed before we left. I’ll talk more about it in a future blog, but essentially, it’s a diesel-powered heater that sits under the floor and blows pleasantly warm air into the cabin. As I write this, we’re in northern California, and the temperatures along our route where we’ve camped have dropped down to the mid 30s. Our nice little diesel heater has kept us warm and snug. Like the Mule Bags, we love it!

Mosquito Proofing



We’re heading to major mosquito country, and mosquito-proofing Blanche was another high priority item. Last year, we added mosquito netting to the sliding door on the side of the van, and a big screen curtain enclosing the rear garage area. That big curtain in back was an ongoing problem, however. Whenever I needed to access anything in the garage under the bed, which was pretty much anytime we stopped to camp, I’d have to unzip the curtain, allowing any nearby mosquitoes free access to the interior of the van. To address this problem, I planned to shorten the curtain and seal the bottom of it using a magnetic strip. That was easy enough, but unfortunately, there were still dozens of paths for a bloodthirsty mossie to make its way from the garage to the rest of the van. It took the better part of a week to finish the walls of the garage and/or screen off any openings leading from the garage to the living area.

Microwave

When we camp in the southwest, we almost always cook outside, either on the camp stove or over a campfire. What we discovered during our big road trip from Seattle to Maine last summer, was that it rains a lot more up north. This wasn’t really a major revelation, but what we didn’t realize was how many cold, improvised dinners we’d be eating inside the van when it was too wet and cold to cook outside. We did bring our tiny backpacker’s stove, but it’s kind of smelly to use inside, and I worry about setting something on fire in our confined space. What would have been nice was a microwave.

Once the Mule Bags were installed, we found that there was just enough room to mount one above the sink. We should have sufficient battery capacity to run it long enough to cook dinner and maybe even pop a bag of popcorn. We bought the smallest microwave we could find, a 0.7 cu-ft model, and built a shelf for it to sit on, and it’s been working fine. We were also able to use the front of it to hold a small stick-on mirror. The only issue is that we both have a tendency to smack our heads on the corner of the shelf while brushing our teeth.

Running Boards

Blanche sits rather high off the ground, and sometimes it’s a struggle for these old legs getting up that first step. Adding running boards was something that has been on the list for awhile now, and we finally got to them this spring.

And some minor stuff

Those were the bigger projects. There were also several minor items:

Trekking Pole Mounts

There was just enough vacant wall space left to mount our trekking poles.


Handle in Rear

We stand on the rear bumper when changing the sheets, and there was no place to hold onto. Adding a handle solved this problem.

We also added a few coat hooks, some hat hooks and made a little progress on some of the cosmetics of the interior.

Finish Rear Door

It still needs work, but adding this panel to the rear door covered the big gaping opening that was there. We added similar panels to the walls of the garage area that improved the appearance and helped with the mosquito proofing.

Our to-do list is just about all checked off, but we’ll no doubt have an entire new list by the time we finish our Alaska trip.

See you next week…