Rants and Revelations

Wednesday night, some of our fellow Cougites (yes, I’m inventing that word, and no, I will not be taking notes) said that they were going for a hike at 7:30 am. Did you know there was a 7:30 am now? I guess I knew back when I worked, but I’m retired, and mornings are for lazily checking all my socials, doing the Wordle and Connections, and stretching out my hamstrings as well as I can. The four of us might toddle out of bed by 10 am, but only because we all need a pee.

Also, because of my chronic pain and Vicki’s sciatica, not to mention the blisteringly hot weather we had while we were there, we’re really only good for one “thing” a day. Sometimes two. And while we were there, that one thing was variously a hike to Old Man Cave, a trip into Logan to shop at the Kroeger, a hike to Ash Cave, playing corn hole (extremely badly – the spectators made us stop at 11 because otherwise the rest of the brackets wouldn’t get done by dinner). Also, Vicki signed up to provide a bunch of stuff for the pot luck dinners on Friday and Saturday night, so she spent a lot of time cooking.

The cave hikes were amazing. In many ways they reminded me of the Niagara Escarpment, especially the Bruce Peninsula, except the cliffs and undercut caves were on both sides of you. But there were differences too – these cliffs were sandstone rather than dolomite, so they didn’t have rectilinear cracks all through them, and the pattern of water erosion was different. Both “caves” were more big overhangs where the cliffs had been undercut by running water. I found Old Man Cave more interesting because the hike is through a narrower canyon and there were some very interestingly designed bridges over the river in several places. I would have loved to fly my drone though there and video some of that, but the process of getting permission to fly in an Ohio State Park was somewhat complex. Plus I probably would have had to do it at 7:30 am, whenever that is.

As I said, there were a couple of pot luck dinners in the evenings – plenty of food and really good food too. Brian make pork butt that was excellent. One morning there was a pot luck breakfast as well. I forget who was manning the grill (I told you I’m bad with names, didn’t I) but he somehow made world’s thickest pancakes without burning the outside or leaving a gloppy uncooked core.

Friday I flew my drone around to take another video of the campsite while everybody else was lined up for dinner. As I’m writing this it’s still uploading, but when it’s ready, it should be visible at:

After dinner, the evening’s entertainment was often sitting around the campfire and chatting with the other Cougites. Some nights we played a game called Left Right Center, which is completely random and mindless, but also crazily entertaining. A good thing to play when you’re drinking your favorite adult beverages.

One of the suckiest thing about chronic pain is no matter how careful you are to try and sit in a way to minimize the pain, it just sucks the energy out of you all day, so it’s mostly my fault that we didn’t stay well into the night at the campfire like so many other people did. I feel bad about that, because I loved the time we did have together.

Saturday night and Sunday morning, many of the other Cougites were packing up to leave, and by the time we had sorted out ours and the dogs bathroom activities, there was only one other Cougar left. And they left the next day. We stayed until Wednesday – it’s the first time we’ve camped for a week in our trailer, and it’s not the end because on Wednesday we packed up and headed for another campground, Mountain Top Campground in PA. We’re going to be here until next Tuesday, making a 15 day total trip. We’re trying to expand our time horizons for trips because either next year or the year after, we’d like to take a trip out of British Columbia, maybe doing the US route one way and the Canadian route the other.

Because I bet you’re dying to know, we used the pooper scooter 3 days at Top O’ The Caves, doing the grey tank 3 times and the black tank once. I know a lot of people say they don’t use the pooper scooter with the black tank, but I gave it a good and thorough flush-out afterwards, and did the grey tank afterwards, making 3 trips on the same day.

Oh, and returning from one of those trips to the dump station, I got what I assume is the southern equivalent of a bollocking – after I drove back to our site, the two “trainee camp hosts” at the entrance to our loop of the campsite came by in their golf cart, and asked me if I was all right because they saw me driving fast and assumed I was having an emergency. They sounded so geniune. Yeah, ok, I get it. I tried to pay more attention to the 5 mph speed limit after that. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re going out to the dump station, because the pooper scooter says not to exceed that speed, but coming back empty with the scooter in the bed of your truck when your loop of the campground is almost completely empty, not so much.

This past few days was the (see title for the whole name) KC2GLRR at Top O’ The Caves campground in Hocking Hills Ohio. We left home on Tuesday, but did it in two stages so Tuesday night we stopped in a Harvest Host for the first night. Now the thing about Harvest Hosts is that they ostensibly free, but you’re supposed to buy something they’re selling to repay them. This night we stopped at Debonné Vineyards, and we’d hoped to discharge our obligation by buying dinner there, but we got there at 5:30 and their kitchen closed at 5. So Vicki bought 3 bottles of some wine that she didn’t even like that much.

Since we couldn’t eat there, we had to head into town for dinner. The person at the front desk had given Vicki directions to the nearby small town with three restaurants they recommended. Unfortunately because they were drawing the directions upside down so that Vicki could follow along, they got one of the first turns backwards and everything else wasn’t working. Fortunately Apple Maps got us going the right direction. When we got to the restaurant, we saw the person who had given Vicki the directions, as well as a couple of other people from Debonné, and some people we’d seen in the Vineyard’s parking spot who were traveling by car even though they were fellow RVers. Also fellow fans of the YouTube channel Happily Ever Hanks.

Taking the much faster route back to our camper, we figured out where we’d turned wrong and turned our 4 mile trip to the restaurant into a 12 mile one.

So after a night of boondocking, we had an uneventful second leg (meaning I don’t remember any details). Vicki drove more than half, but I wanted to take over before we got into the difficult roads in the hills. Although we’re theoretically under-trucked for the weight of our trailer, Lopez (that’s our truck’s name because his license number starts with “LPZ”) handled it like a champ. No problems with any of the steep hills up or down, and around sharp turns and the like. I never had any reason to wish for a more powerful truck.

We pulled into our camp spot and it was just wall to wall Cougars. No, not the female kind (although there were a few of those), the particular make and model of our trailer. Like car models of my youth, they all had slight cosmetic differences because Keystone likes to mix things up, but also there was a great variety of custom mods and enhancements people have made.

Many of the people we’d met in the spring at the mini-meetup in Van Buren were there, as were some people we didn’t know yet. Unfortunately I have a terrible memory for names, and so I’m probably going to get some names wrong if I try to go into details, so I’ll be vague.

There were going to be more people from the group arriving in the next few days, but already we had almost this entire loop of the campsite for the members of the group. There were a maximum of two non-Cougar trailers in this loop, and one of those was a “camp host in training”.

The sites on this loop were not particularly well leveled. It took us a bit of maneuvering around to find a way to park the trailer that it was level-able. We had water and electricity hookups, but no sewer. Because we were planning to stay for a week here, I’d brought a brand new sewer tote, or pooper scooter, or whatever you call it. It’s a 36 gallon tank with wheels and fill and emptying ports that you can use for emptying your own grey and black water tanks. We’ve found that with a normal amount of usage – showers and dish washing and the like – we fill our 30 gallon grey tank in about 3 days. We didn’t really know how long it takes to fill the black tank, because in the past when we filled the grey tank we’d had to hitch back up, disconnect all the services, stow everything movable, and haul the trailer to the dump station, then come back to the campsite and unhitch and get settled again. And if you’re going to do all that, you’re obviously going to empty all your tanks. But with the new tote, I can empty the tanks one at a time as needed.

As a bit of an aside, it’s pretty much standard to hang the tote on the ladder on the back of the trailer. I tried that when I first got it, and realized I needed to put it up as high as possible so it didn’t block the turn signals and brake lights. Remember what I said about the site being not very level? Well it turns out it’s a lot easier to put the tote up very high on the ladder when you’re on a nice flat driveway, and considerably harder to get it off when you’re on a slope where you’re standing 3 feet lower than the ground level of the trailer. Fortunately Vicki was able to rustle up some other guys to help me. I’ve decided from now one to keep the tote in the pickup bed when it’s not in use.

After we got the trailer squared away and went around introducing or re-introducing ourselves to people, I flew my drone around the campsite to try to capture how many people are here. Unfortunately my upload bandwidth sucks, so I wasn’t able to put it on YouTube. I generated a very low-res version and put it on Facebook, but it was in a comment so I don’t think very many people saw it.

Update – new campground has wifi, so here it is in full 4K glory on YouTube:

*End Part 1*

So the bathroom fan in the trailer has been a bit of a pain point for two reasons:

• First, and foremost, Vicki has trouble reaching the knob that opens the cover, and the switch that turns on the fan.
• And as a secondary consideration, the fan is tiny and doesn’t move a lot of air. Also only vents outward at one speed.

So I bought a fan that actually fills the whole housing, has a speed and direction control, and which has a remote control. Then I waited for several weeks to install it because I was looking for a weather forecast that showed two days of no rain and non-scorching temperatures. It seemed like every day was either raining or temps above 90F. So we got the weather window on Monday and Tuesday. Sure, the temps were still in the high 80s, but that’s better than 90, anyway.

I’d been told by people who’d done it that it should only take one day, but I know my limitations, and I also know how many times I’ve found in the middle of a project that I had to run out for more tools or supplies. Turns out that planning for two days was a smart decision.

I’ve watched a number of YouTube videos on how to do this, and they all said that you basically just need to “roll up the rim” (sorry, non-Canadians, you won’t understand) or peel off the existing sealant after you take the old fan out. Well, I was unable to do that – it was stuck too hard. Instead I used a sharp scraper and just sliced off the layers of sealant as best as I can. I did end up gouging into the trailer roof skin a few times, but I made sure to put extra sealant on those areas.

Cutting off as much of the sealant as I could took all of the first day. At the end of it, I was dehydrated and extremely sunburned. No idea why I forgot to put on sunscreen. It’s not like I’ve been getting regular sunburns since I was a baby.

As you can maybe see in the photo above, the wires come out from under the folded over roof skin. I cut those off, and I went to Home Depot and bought some WAGO connectors to wire the new fan in. Now it had power, I tested the fan with the remote and with the switches on the inside. Worked great.

I drilled new holes where the holes were in the new fan housing, because they weren’t all in exactly the same place as the old one. I put down strips of butyl tape over both the old holes and the new holes. The fan fit into the existing hole just fine, except I was disappointed to find I needed to take out the existing interior shroud and use the one that came with the new fan. I was hoping to avoid it, because I wasn’t 100% confident in how I was going to trim the new one to the contour of the roof. Turned out it was super easy, barely an inconvenience.

After I screwed the fan down onto the butyl tape strips, I put sealant all over the flange, and the edges of the flange. I used one tube of the stuff. I’ve heard other people talk about using 3 tubes of it, but I can’t see why – it seems like I used twice as much as you’d think, and it was piled up pretty high.

After that, I tidied up the roof, and went inside and marked and trimmed and installed the interior shroud. Tested the fan again, and it worked great. Then I had to put on gloves and fish out the bits of sealant that fell in the toilet when I was scraping.

Afterwards, Vicki gave it the full test. She pronounced it satisfactory. I’m very proud.