The low point drains on my RV trailer are two PEX tubes, one red and one blue, with a threaded adaptor on the end and caps on the adaptors. The red one is the hot water system, and the blue one is the cold water system. After removing the caps a couple of times when it was freezing cold outside I read with interest about people who installed taps on the adaptors instead of the caps.
I ordered two of these taps, also color coded for hot and cold, and attempted to install them. The cold one worked fine, at least it did after I also ran out and bought some teflon tape. Before I put teflon tape on them, the water pump would run every 12 seconds or so, and the tap was dripping. The hot one, on the other hand, was a disaster. The tap got slightly cross threaded, and because the tap is metal and the adaptor is plastic, it basically dug it’s own thread pattern into the adaptor and I was unable to rethread it so it would go on properly. Fortunately the end cap still went on just fine with no leaks, so I was able to kick the can down the road a bit.
When I decided it was time to do something about it, I thought that what I’m going to have to do is remove that adaptor, and replace it with something else. But in an effort to be cheap, I didn’t want to buy the specialized tools you need to remove and replace the crimp ring/clamp ring that was holding the adaptor on. I read somewhere that you can remove the clamp ring with a pair of pliers, and there was something called a “shark bite” fitting that would go on without tools. Score!
I ordered two of these “shark bite” taps – actually these ones are called “press to fit” because “Shark Bite” is a trademark. These ones are pretty big compared to the other ones I already had. And after spending a couple of hours on my back under the trailer, I discovered that you can’t remove the clamp ring with just a pair of pliers, but a pair of diagonal cutters might do it. So off to the hardware store and got a pair of “dykes”.
With the dykes, I was able to get the ring off, but the adaptor wouldn’t come out of the pipe. So I went home for the day to have a think.
The next day I set off to the hardware store, only to find a gigantic hole in my tire, but that’s a story for another time. So the day after that, with new tires on my truck, I set off to the hardware store and bought a PEX cutter. I figured I’d cut off the pipe below the adaptor and put in the new tap. But at the store, I was having a sudden sense that I’d got the size of the PEX pipe wrong so my new taps wouldn’t work. So I also bought an adaptor that would let me use the tap from the first set if the PEX pipe ended up being 1/2” instead of 3/8”.
Back at the trailer, it turns out the second set of taps I bought fit fine, and so I didn’t need the adaptor. But after getting the one tap working, I didn’t see a reason to cut off the perfectly working first tap I put on, so I’ve got unmatched taps. And I’ve got the adaptor, and the cold tap from one set and the hot tap from another set rattling around in my truck. I wonder if having different taps is a faux pas?
I got a pretty late start on paddling this year. It’s not like when I was racing – I remember one year when somebody asked me when my off season was, and I checked Garmin Connect and told them I hadn’t done any paddling between December 16th and January 6th, so I guess that was it. Between the fact that there were no races to train for, and this spring has been rainy and cold, there just weren’t any opportunities.
Today was my third paddle of the season. Last time, I went for 40 minutes and my physiotherapist Emma suggested I stick on that level of effort for a while. But I couldn’t help it – I paddled down for 20 minutes, knowing it would take a bit longer to come back because I’d had a tail wind. But the way back was very hard – I assumed because of the wind. I ended up taking a few breaks, and my shoulders were quite sore. I went into full “Boyan-mode”, paddling with my elbows down and almost no movement in my shoulders. But I was still completely done when I finished. I had to take another break before I could even lift the boat out of the water.
It was only after I got my boat on the roof rack that I noticed the rudder flag. “Hey, I don’t remember putting that on….come to think of it, I don’t remember taking it off…oh, and it’s soaking wet!” Yes, I’d inadvertently given myself some extra drag.
When I was racing, some of the real hard core types would put a rope with a knot or two on it around their boat, or even a couple of tennis balls, just for extra drag and more training effect. Knowing how fragile my shoulders are, there was no way I would participate in this madness. The closest I’d come was to switch to a wider boat, especially when training out on Lake Ontario. A little extra drag, a lot more stability, and I could really put the power down even in waves.
Last weekend (May 9-11) we did an RV trip to the Lake Placid/Saranac Lake area. Originally I’d planned to just do it on my own, because my main purpose for doing it was so I could shoot some drone footage at the ‘Round The Mountain Canoe/Kayak Race. They should probably rename that, because it’s not just canoes and kayaks, it’s also pack boats (a canoe-like boat with a lot of tumblehome so it’s paddled with a kayak paddle – most of them are made by Placid Boat Works) and guide boats (a bigger boat, rowed by one person, and sometimes with a person in the stern with a canoe paddle, based on the boats that Adirondak guides used a hundred years ago) and stand up paddle boards. I thought Vicki would be bored if I dragged her along but not only did she come on the trip, but she came to the race as well.
Anyway, we had a rainy drive up on Friday. RVLife once again tried to kill us by trying to route us via an illegal U-turn on a divided highway with almost no median between the directions, just a gap in the fence and a “No U-turns except emergency vehicles” sign. It’s funny, because mere minutes before this we passed an exit that I said “I normally go off here when using Google or Apple Maps, I wonder why RVLife is having us miss it?”
We arrived at the campground just a few minutes late for a normal check in. Some of the KOA people were still hanging around the late check in desk and handed us our mirror tag and camp map with the route to our campsite helpfully drawn in. It was a pull-through site, full service. Something we haven’t had yet this year. I pulled through, and checked our trailer location and declared it in proper position, so we set about leveling and unhitching and putting down the jacks and out the slides. But when it came time to hook up the water service, I discovered that the thing I’d thought was the water spigot was just some other piece of infrastructure, and the spigot was actually on the backside of the electrical post. And wouldn’t you know it, the water hose ended up being 4 feet short. Oh well, I thought, it’s a pain but I guess we’ll have to hitch up again and move the trailer back 4 feet.
That’s when disaster struck. The front set of jacks wouldn’t retract. The relay made a click, but there was no motor sound. So now we’ve got two problems, and no easy way to fix them. The Facebook technical guru Steve was also camping, and both of us had intermittent 1 dot of signal. But he said to try resetting everything, but that didn’t work. Also it turned out that the manual retraction of the jacks uses a proprietary connection, and evidently we didn’t get one with our trailer, or misplaced it. So we decided that we had to get some more drinking water hose.
We drove into Lake Placid and Saranac Lake, and didn’t find any place selling garden hose. We did stop at a grocery store and bought some bottled water to tide us through the night, and we just didn’t do any dishes and went to the camp toilets when necessary. Normally I like to travel with 5-10 gallons or so in the fresh water tank, but I forgot to fill it this time.
The rain finally stopped at some point in the night, which made me happy about the possibilities of being able to fly my drones, although the race has a history of dawning sunny and light winds, and it whipping up to a gale and rain just a few minutes before start time.
Next morning, the KOA camp store opened at 9, and they had drinking water hose. So we got the trailer hooked up and were able to flush toilets and wash dishes again. That was one burden off my mind. Also got to try the new Rhino Adaptor Pro – I’d been searching all over the internet for one of these things after they got announced this spring, and finally got one last week by driving 40 minutes away to a Walmart that had two of them. It’s everything I’d hoped – it makes a good water and smell tight seal with the sewage connection so you don’t have to pile rocks or sandbags to keep the “stinky slinky” from slipping out.
Unfortunately we didn’t pay attention to the time and we ended up leaving the campground just slightly too late to make the start of the race, so I headed straight to the one and only place where the race goes under a road bridge, on Rte 3 between First Pond and Second Pond. We parked up there and I trudged into the woods and set up to launch and retrieve my drone there. And really none too early, because the first paddlers showed up about 15-20 minutes later.
Uncharacteristically for ‘Round The Mountain, the weather stayed good for the whole race, with very little wind and no rain. It was overcast, which is a slight bummer because I love the video you get when it’s blue skies and sunny.
Like I said, I set up kind of in the wood where I had a good view over First Pond, but there was somebody else with a drone on or near the bridge, and sometimes I got thrown off by the sound of a drone coming from my right when I knew my drone was to my left. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered that before.
I spent nearly an hour videoing there, until I saw what I assumed was a sweeper boat. In my racing days, I was always up near the pointy end of the race, and I was pretty much laser focused on one or two other kayaks who I’d consider rivals, and every other boat out there was just an obstacle to pass or a potential wake to try to ride. So I was kind of amazed how many boats there were in the race, especially how many pack boats.
After that, we drove down to the finish and I did some more videoing there. I didn’t stay to the end there. But I got another half hour or so of video, and then packed up my drone. Met some old friends who were in the race, and invited them out to dinner.
Before dinner we went back to the campsite to rest up and change. I also spend some time working on the level problem. Did some googling, and found a document about setting up the In-Command system, which controls all the fancy stuff on the trailer, like the lights and the jacks and the furnace. And it described a way of manually extending and retracting the levels using a rotary switch and button on the In-Command circuit board. What I didn’t realize was that this method still used the relay, but sometimes ignorance is bliss because on the second attempt I got this button to actually retract the front jacks. Just after I did that, Steve came back on-line long enough to tell me that my problem was probably a relay, and the In-Command circuit board has a couple of spare relays below the in-use relays. I swapped the relay and now I could extend and retract the jacks with the app, and suddenly I wasn’t worried about anything any more.
We went out for dinner with Roger and Jim and Kim. It was a new brew-pub place in Saranac Lake and very popular, so there was a long wait to get seated – but interestingly enough, the wait list was managed in the Yelp app which told you how many people were ahead of you and your expected seating time. The food was excellent, and the beers on tap were pretty good, although Jim didn’t like his and switched to a Bud Lite. Can’t fault a guy for knowing what he likes, but he was pretty annoyed that they didn’t comp him the beer he didn’t like and only drank a few sips from.
Next morning was blue skies and sunshine, although the wind was a little higher. I was tempted to send the drone up to get pictures of the campground, but I figured I had enough video editing to do and I didn’t need to do any more. Plus Vicki had taken a bunch of pictures.
The drive home was also uneventful and more pleasant than the drive out. And RVLife didn’t try to kill us this time.
It’s now Friday, and in that time I’ve only managed to edit the First Pond footage. I still have the finish line footage to deal with. I was going to make one long video but I decided it had been long enough so I duplicated the project and cut off the unedited second part and uploaded that to YouTube. It isn’t terrible, if I do say so myself.
The day started at sometime between 4 and 5 AM when Gizmo puked on the bed. Through the duvet cover, through the duvet, through the sheets and through the mattress cover. We stripped off the duvet and top sheet, put a towel over the bottom sheet, and went back to sleep.
When we woke up for real, we discovered the travails of getting the trailer parked had all been worth it, because all the door side windows were facing a fantastic view through the trees to the lake and at the “mountain” on the other side.
After a nice breakfast of oatmeal with raspberries and blackberries, we took the dogs for a walk around the lake. Thanks to Riot, we had to just sort of shrug in apology to all the people with dogs who he barked his head off at, but we met several people who enjoyed his enthusiastic greetings. We met our camp hosts about half way around where they were sitting on some picnic tables where they could get a data connection. Sadly not our network – our phones continued to do the “now you see it, now you don’t” trick of showing one bar of 5G or LTE, then reverting to “SAT” or “SOS”. We sometimes manage to get off a SMS or receive one by connecting to Starlink, but it’s not something you can count on all the time.
After the walk, we headed into town to wash the sheets and duvet, and also to stop at the Giant for to replace the food we forgot in the freezer when we left. On the way down on Monday, the truck had popped up a warning that it was time for an oil change, but sadly there was no quick oil change places in town. There were regular service stations, but I didn’t want to have to call around and see who could fit us in. So we spent the time between cycles sitting in the truck catching up on social media.
On the way into down, we’d been on a very long downhill behind a big truck that was going 20mph (as required by the signage). I used the buttons on the steering wheel to downshift and use engine braking, but sadly when we got to the bottom of the hill I couldn’t figure out how to get it back into automatic mode, so instead I waited until a stop sign and put it in neutral and back into drive. I suppose I should have looked online how to do that when we were catching up, but I had important stuff to do, like find out who had liked my posts.
Afterwards, we spent some time just sitting out under our awning, enjoying the view and sipping our drinks. Since my Facebook feed is full of clips from the DockTok dads, I felt like we should be telling dad jokes to each other, but neither of us could think of any. Riot continued his job of making enemies of everyone with dogs and friends of anybody without.
It was a pretty quiet and restful afternoon and evening, until the foreshadowed disaster happened and while I was washing dishes the drains stopped draining. I was unsure if that was just “we have a clog” or “oh oh, the grey tank is full”, but then the bathroom sink drain stopped draining, so it’s the grey tank thing for sure. (The people who thought the bathroom sink was connected to the black tank can suck it, we win that bet.) Which means first thing Wednesday we’re going to have to hitch up and go take the trailer out to the dump station, and then have all the fun of backing into this space again. Ugh.
Last year, when we put our trailer away for the winter, we sat down and decided when it would be safe to start camping again. And I thought we could get a nice early start if we headed directly south, for about the limit of our one day towing endurance. Based on a recommendation on Reddit’s r/GoRV, we settled on Cowan’s Gap State Park in Pennsylvania. I booked it on ReserveAmerica.com in October, because that’s how eager we were. RVLife told us it was about a 5.5 hour drive, maybe a smidge longer. But I know what a slowpoke I am when driving this trailer, so I figured it would probably be closer to 7 hours, including slowness and time for a few rest stops. So I figured we should set off about 10 am, so we’d arrive with enough daylight for setting up. And true to our normal form, we put the truck in drive on the dot of 11:18.
The drive started out a bit rainy, so I drove for about an hour, but then it brightened up and dried up and we were on a nice stretch of interstate, so Vicki took over. It was all very peaceful and nice. After a couple of hours I started looking for a fuel stop.
I mentioned on the previous post that we have one app for RV-safe navigation and two apps for finding discounted diesel fuel. Well, it’s often not easy to mentally transpose the route from the navigation app to the fuel apps, especially since the phone is on a short cord to connect it to the truck. Maybe it would have worked better if we’d stopped. But I’d confidently extrapolated our current route about fifty miles ahead and picked a fuel stop that had a good discount and according to my calculations we’d get there with about 30 miles of range left. But then it all went wrong when RVLife suddenly had us veering off of the interstate onto what seemed alarmingly tiny roads. I couldn’t figure out where exactly we were going, so I abandoned the idea of finding discounted fuel and just concentrated on finding diesel. I found one station that wasn’t far off our route, and I directed Vicki there. By now, the fuel light was on, and we were getting a bit worried. We pulled in and breathed a sign of relief, only to find we couldn’t fuel there because it was some sort of member’s only thing. I wish Google had told us that. The man who did tell us that told us where there was a nearby station that did have diesel. So with very little range left, I took over the driving, and punched that location into Google, and set off.
And that’s where things went very wrong. Because as I drove out, I noticed Google wasn’t navigating us there. I semi-blindly punched a few buttons and got it navigating. But it took us down some increasingly desolate roads, the sort of places where you expect to either hear banjos or meet up with Larry, Daryl and Daryl. Eventually it announced we were “there”, which was a 3 way intersection between the road we’d just come down, a road marked “private”, and a road that looked too narrow for our trailer. It also started navigating us to the gas station we were aiming for. That’s when I realized that when I thought it odd that I’d had to tap “add to route” before I had tapped “navigate on CarPlay”, I must have tapped a random point on the map first, and that’s where we were. At a random point on the map.
We got to the diesel station with about 10 miles left on our estimated range. And it wasn’t a truck stop like I prefer when we are towing a trailer, which meant it was a bit of a production to get pulled into one of the pumps, and an even worse production to leave after we filled up, but I managed it with only backing up and trying again twice, and no paint scrapes on the side of the camper. But we got filled up, and I bought some DEF since we were low on that as well. (Another advantage of a real truck stop is that they have a pump for DEF but here we bought a box of it.) And I felt a lot more relaxed now.
After that, it didn’t take long to get to the campsite. We arrived at the front gate at almost exactly 7pm. The trip odometer on the truck said we’d driven for just about 8 hours. The park office was closed, so we just went directly to our campsite. We didn’t see any dump station on the way in, so we didn’t dump our tanks, which I would have preferred to do since we did put antifreeze and then bleach-water then fresh water through all the taps while re-winterizing and de-winterizing after our last trip, plus one night in a Harvest Host on the way home from that, plus I took a shower to verify the leakage. (I was tempted to write “we didn’t dump our tanks like we’d do normally”, but as this is only our third trip, there’s no “normally” yet.) There was a paper with my name on it on the post at our campsite so we were reassured that we were in the right place.
It turns out that I’d done a terrible job of choosing a campsite, in that it was probably the most difficult one in the whole site to get backed into. I hit a large tree. Then I hit a tiny one. Then I hit the large one again. Then I hit the tiny one again. Vicki kept shouting at me to turn away but when you’re backing up a trailer nothing turns quite like you’d want it to. At one point I jackknifed far enough to put a tiny little dent in the front of the trailer. By the time we did get it in place, it was dark and very slightly drizzling. But we’re both pretty adept at getting everything all set up and in no time we had the trailer unhitched and leveled and the electric “shore power” plugged in and the slider out and it was starting to look like home again. And we took the dogs for a walk around the loop road in the dark to get everybody settled.
