Propane Delivery

In spite of what I may have said earlier about having to bring all your utilities with you to Slab City, in fact some came to us yesterday.  We got the word the propane truck was coming, and neighbor Seann gave us a sign to post up in the window to let the driver know we wanted a delivery.  He arrived late morning, but it wasn’t until mid-afternoon that he finally got to us.  The Loners On Wheels club (LOWs) were having a big gathering/rally, and so there are a lot of folks at the Slabs right now.  It took him a few hours to work his way through all the folks who wanted propane.  Price was $3.40 a gallon, which was about thirty cents more than what we could have gotten it for if we’d taken our tanks the four miles to Niland and filled up at the Buckshot (which in addition to serving awesome food, also sells propane.  Go figure, it’s a very small town).  But it was probably worth the small savings in order to not have to make the trek into town with the tanks.

We got all our tanks topped up except the one tank I’ve been running on KD.  I would rather not go home with two full tanks (due to tongue weight concerns), so I will run down the one I’m using now (which was full when we put it on at the start of this trip), and if necessary will use the other one just filled today.   The one I had filled was one that came with KD when I bought her.  I may have trouble filling it at other places, since it is past the date when by law it must be pressure tested before being refilled.  I was just going to ditch it, but it is still a perfectly sound tank, so if I can get one more use out of it, I will.  The other one that had come with KD had the old-style valve on it, and so could not legally be filled.  I had a full tank from other camping trips, which had never been used, though it has been carted around on several trips as a backup supply.  It has finally met its destiny, supplying the stove and water heater in KD.  But I was concerned we might use it up to run the water heater, and I didn't want to run out mid-shower, so I wanted the older tank filled too, if possible.

When the truck finally reached our compound, we waved it over to us.

Biela's rig got its built in tank filled first.  The rest of our collection lined up and waiting.

My tank took 4.5 gallons and the driver rounded the cost to $15.  Propane deliveries were once a regular part of my life.  I quietly thought it sort of symbolic to once again see the familiar, lumbering propane truck heading over to provide my home with this needed commodity. 

After that business was concluded, I did a huge mountain of dishes which I'd allowed to collect.  Most of them were from Little Christmas dinner.  That took a fair bit of water.  I have the three bucket method, taught to me by a dear brother years ago as practiced at the Rainbow Gathering, down pat.  But I'm still refining the best way to do dishes in KD, and I haven't quite got it perfected.  I always feel daggers of guilt when I rinse the dishes under running water, feeling like I'm wasting it.  It's not really an issue here, given the amount of water we have in the drum tank and our ability to replenish it.  But years of dry camping have conditioned me to be miserly with water even when there isn't such a need to be.  And there's no doubt that last huge load of dishes put a dent in the supply.  We had done a water run the previous evening, so we had the water to top up the tank.  It was just a matter of transferring from our 6 and 7 gallon containers to the main tank.  Today I decided to try a syphon hose I brought along.  It worked beautifully.

It slowed things down slightly because it takes longer for the water to flow through the hose than it does to dump it directly out of the container mouth, but it meant that we didn't have to lift the containers off of Goose's tailgate.  We could just run the syphon to the barrel.  It's a tube called a shake syphon.  I bought this one years ago a county fair.  You can now get them on the Internet.  You shake the end up and down in the water and a marble alternately lets a column of water in to the hose until a syphon is started.  Works great, no sucking on the end of the hose required.

Soon the barrel was topped up and ready for another round of showers and dish washing.