Month: April 2025

First RV trip of the season Part 2

So after our RVLife inspired detour, we actually arrived at the park. Actually we were starting to get a little crabby with each other, because of the stress of the drive in the gusty winds and rain, but it all melted away when we drove through the gate and did a U-turn to drain our tanks. Because as we were getting ready to “Let-Er-Rip” (any fans of Happily Ever Hanks reading this?) another truck towing a 22MLS came in the gate. We introduced ourselves, and recognized their names from the Facebook group.

After we dumped, we moved to the fresh water tap that was shown on the park map (I believe I mentioned in First RV trip of the season Part 1 that the information we had said that there weren’t water spigots at each campsite.) While we were there, before the park host coming by and telling us about the water hookups, we saw and exchanged introductions with another couple from the Facebook group who were heading out, and who pointed out another couple who had just arrived ahead of us and were still backing into their spot.

Once we got told about the individual spigots, we left the common tap and headed to the campsite with our fresh tank nearly 3/4 full. Even if we didn’t need it, at least we knew we wouldn’t be blowing away when it got windy.

Backing into the campsite only took a few attempts, I’m definitely getting better at this. Still not good, but better. And setting up is also getting a bit more organized and smoother. After we set up, we took the dogs for a walk and went around introducing ourselves to the other 22MLS families. I don’t recall if we met them all not that evening, but in total there were 7 22MLSs parked there. The spot next to ours was reserved for another member of the group, but they’d decided not to drive in the driving rain and so missed the event. There was another couple with daughter who were pulling a different Keystone Cougar, not a 22MLS but something a bit longer and with a “bunkhouse”. They showed up after I got the photos and videos below, but were part of our group.

We spent 3 nights at Van Buren. The weather was rainy and windy a lot of the time, but I did manage to get drone up one morning. Most days were spent alternating between hanging around inside the trailer when the weather was terrible, and hanging around somebody’s picnic table shooting the… breeze, usually with a drink in hand. Evenings we spent at Mark and Kim’s fire pit enjoying a bonfire, even in a light rain, again with a drink in hand. We missed having that on the last night because it was raining quite hard.

I don’t want to sound like a snob, but other than a cheery wave or two, I don’t think we interacted with the campers that weren’t part of our group.

The group on the other side of us away from the 22MLS group were two trailers who were together. They had a very nice looking blonde lab, but unfortunately Riot made any conversation impossible. I wish we could get him to stop barking at other dogs. Another group at the campsite were kind of jerks. They tended to leave very early in the morning and come back around sunset, but one day they left their music playing through their outside speakers all day when they weren’t there. They had one 5th wheel camper, and three trucks. Two of the trucks had resonators on the exhaust, and they looked home made. Obviously you want your truck to be extraordinarily loud when you’re leaving a campsite at dawn, especially if you spare every expense to make a good resonator.

Vicki took a shower the first day and we discovered that in spite of my thinking I’d got the leak fixed last October, it was still leaking. We did some experiments and discovered it’s not leaking at the seam that I’d caulked back then, and then caulked again with a more robust line of caulk just before we’d left on the trip. It was actually leaking even if we put the water straight down the drain. Vicki removed the access door in front of the shower pan, and neither of us could see or feel any leak. One of our Facebook group members, Bryan, came over and took a look too, and he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from either. I think we all agreed there was a tiny bit of dampness, but the insulation in there wasn’t wet, so we thought the leak was probably at the interface between the piping and the grey tank. Later on, Vicki discovered that it also leaks when we pour a lot of water down the kitchen sink, which makes sense because the pipe from the kitchen sink meets the pipe from the shower quite near the entry to the grey tank.

With sadness we said our good-byes on the Sunday morning and headed off to the Harvest Host we’d booked for the night. The driving wasn’t bad, there was a bit of wind, but no driving rain and the trailer wasn’t being pushed around so much.

The Harvest Host was a winery/restaurant, and it was closer to the half-way point than the distillery we’d stayed on the way out. It also had a functional kitchen. I set up the trailer while Vicki went in and ordered dinner for us both. After all the stress of driving and all the socializing and drinking, it was nice just to collapse in the recliners and eat a fairly decent but very expensive hamburger.

We got home mid afternoon on Tuesday, and the forecast for that night was for below freezing temps and possibly snow, so I couldn’t rest as much as I wanted to. I had to re-winterize immediately. I only had two jugs of anti-freeze, which turned out to be barely adequate. I plugged the trailer into the garage and turned on the tank heaters, because I had no way to dump the grey and black tanks from the last night and I wasn’t sure I’d put in enough anti-freeze in them.

It was snowing the next morning, and the forecast was for several more days of below freezing lows, so I wanted more anti-freeze to put more in the tanks for when we put it in storage. The Home Depot website said that they had 100 bottles of it at the second nearest store, so we headed there and then spent over an hour occupying several associates trying to find them. We found the empty shelf with the bar codes, and one of the associates told me his app told him they were in the storage above the shelves on another row, but we went there and couldn’t find them. So then our group of associates dispersed all around the store to check various theories about where they might be.

After this drawn out and frustrating process, I went home and discovered that Lowes said they had them and offered next day delivery, so that’s what I did. I probably ended up with more than I needed in the fresh tank, but at least I was satisfied with how much was in the black and grey tanks so I didn’t have to run the tank heaters any more.

It was a great trip, and I really enjoyed meeting some of the other members of our 22MLS Facebook group.

First RV trip of the season Part 1

Last year, after putting our trailer away for the winter, we sat down and decided that it would be safe to de-winterize it and head out in late April, and just to be really safe, we’d head 5 hours south so we wouldn’t have to worry about sub-freezing temps while we were out.

And that was a really good plan, until Vicki and I both got really interested in the Facebook group for people who owned our brand of trailer (Keystone Cougar Half-Ton 22MLS). And it turns out that some of the members of that group had decided they were going to meet up at a campground in Ohio called Mary Jane Thurston State Park. That’s nearly a 6 hour drive away, especially if you consider how slow you drive when you’re towing a travel trailer. But Vicki got really enthusiastic about the idea of going there. And so did I after a while.

So on the last weekend of March, we went to the RV storage lot and brought our baby home. And with the help of a bunch of sort-of consistent sets of instructions, we de-winterized her. Drained the water tank and all the water lines of anti-freeze, flushed the lines with fresh water, filled the fresh tank about half way up with a cup of bleach, and let it sit overnight. The next day, drained the fresh tank and filled it with fresh water and ran all the taps until the water stopped smelling of chlorine. Afterwards, Vicki complained that she didn’t like the taste, but to me it tasted exactly like the water tasted when I lived in an apartment building in North York Ontario. But I took the point, and next time I disinfect the tank like that, I’ll flush it twice.

While we were getting ready to leave, we got a phone call from Mary Jane Thurston State Park. They said they had some flooding, so they were moving our entire group to Van Buren State Park, which isn’t too much further way. When they said “some flooding”, I envisioned wet fields and maybe puddles, but later one of the 22MLS group went over to look, and the water was up to the seats of the picnic tables and there were geese paddling around. The new park was very nice, nice flat newly paved trailer pads and full electric and water hookups (and a sewer dump at the entrance). Actually, the campsite info we found before we went said they didn’t have water hookups at each site, so on the way we were filling up the fresh tank when the camp host came over and said “we have water at each site”, which my travel addled brain initially interpreted as “the ground is wet”, but I soon realized really meant there is a spigot at every site.

I have to commend the staff at Mary Jane Thurston for being proactive about this and making sure we didn’t end up scattered and disorganized when we arrived and found the campground closed.

Because of the length of the trip, we decided to stop along the way at a Harvest Host. A Harvest Host is a business (often a winery or farm (which is where the name comes from) but now includes brew pubs, distilleries and other businesses) that allows you to park overnight. There is an annual membership fee, but the overnight stays are free, but you’re generally expected (strongly expected) to buy about $30 or so of whatever their product is.

The host we stayed at was a distillery. They had a restaurant, except the company that was staffing his kitchen left last week, so we ordered from another restaurant down the road. This was actually our first “boondocking” experience. “Boondocking” means staying without water, electric and sewer connections. I’m pleased to say our batteries lasted fine, with only a small amount of conserving. Vicki bought some nice distilled spirits to meet our expected buy.

Both days of travel were pretty fraught, with strong gusty winds and driving rain. I was pretty fried at the end of each day’s driving.

There is an app called RVLife Trip Wizard, which is a highly rated trip planner and navigator which takes your rig width and height into account when navigating so you avoid low bridges and narrow streets. It kind of didn’t work for us. Here is part of the route it sent us on:

RVLife’s route

And here is Google, showing how that “road” turned into a tractor track halfway through:

Fortunately the driveway for the barn on the left is big enough to do a K turn in. I think the driver of the school bus I followed up the road was amused.

Thanks, American Imperialism

I’ve got some old code that I almost never edit, because it’s actually been working fine since… I think 2007 or so? I use it every 28 days to load data from the FAA into my database for navaid.com.

This month’s load failed because of an unknown waypoint type “IFR GOA VERTICAL FLT“. I looked in the code, and I did have a known waypoint type “IFR GOM VERTICAL FLT“. Can you guess what happened?

GOM stands for Gulf of Mexico. GOA stands for Gulf of America. They’re waypoints used for position reports for helicopters operating off of drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.