How I Keep Cool in my Camper in the Blazing Hot Sonorian Desert
The temperature rises to 118 degrees in the Phoenix area.
The Sonorian Desert covers 100,000 square miles and includes most of the southern half of Arizona, Southeastern California, and most of the Baja California pennisula, the islands of the Gulf of California and much of the State of Sonora, Mexico. It is a subtropical desert, where it gets cool at night, but scorching hot during the daytime.
How do I keep cool in the gray camper van?
Fantastic Air Fan
There’s a fantastic air fan mounted in the roof of the van that sucks out the hot air, while I run two other fans blowing air in the opposite direction. The roof fan is connected to my engine alternator while the other two (each 12 volt) fans are connected to a Rugged Geek small generator.
But if I’m connected to shore power, then I cool the van with a 14,500 btu Furrion roof mount ac. In a worst case senerio, I will turn on the vehicle AC to cool things off. I’ve done this when camping out in Walmart parking lot overnight.
I’m very cautious traveling in extreme heat and pre-plan my travels to camp in parks that have electrical hook-ups. My current solar set-up is not strong enough to power the A.C. I keep cool at night by using just a fan and I sleep comfortably.
The Desert heat can be brutal. I sip on cold ice water all day to keep hydrated. And I prefer to travel in the Fall and Winter when the average temperature is in the 70’s during the day.
I’m in the process of developing my story characters. While taking an eight week course called the “Eight Crafts of Writing”, I’m learning there are differences between “feelings” and “emotions”, which exist independently.
Love is a feeling, hate is an emotion and the two don’t pair. Love is unconditional or it’s not real love.
Emotions are polar, for example, infatuation and hate feelings are not. Love, happiness, sense of beauty, sense of purpose, and kindness have no opposities, there are only lacks thereof.
Main Characters
I found a generic picutre of a man and a woman, whom I chose to represent my main characters. Smitty Randall Smith is the protatgoist and Adalida Fontenot is the antitagnoist. Now I need to learn how to create inciting incidents and tension to keep my reader engaged. People relate more to negativity, so I plan to keep things moving along because of Adalidas’ gambling addition. She’s hooked on buying “lotto” tickets.
Smitty the homeless veteran is a story about a 75-year-old veteran living under a bridge in New Orleans. He befriends a 55-year-old homeless woman and develops a friendship. The genre of this story is labeled as; Friendship/Buddy Adventure.
As I’m developing character traits on two people, I will develop the skill of using an internal POV (point of view) to hopefully create empathy in my reader.
Conclusion
Desert heat can be dangerous. While using fans, drinking lots of water and enjoying an occasional AC, I don’t struggle with extreme hot temperatures. I find time each day to work on my novel, work on “The Eight Crafts of Writing”, and working on the other social media blog posts.
Thanks for reading!
Kindly,
Carol