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. I’ll put a link here when I get back to civilization.
*End Part 1*