Month: June 2026

The RV life giveth, and the RV life taketh away

This is part 1 of 5 of our long North-ish Ontario trip:

We’re currently on Manitoulin Island., on day 5 of our Ontario loop.

As I mentioned in passing in my last blog post, we spent the first night in Camparks in the Niagara Falls region, just to have a short first day in case we were late leaving, or held up at the border, or got half way to Buffalo and realized we forgot the trailer or something. The campground is nothing special, but the nearby KOA looks like a zoo overrun by children. We didn’t need much for our first night, but we got full hookups because that’s what they had. Even we don’t fill our black or grey tanks in one overnight. Actually, until the incident with the hitch jack and blocks as we were leaving, I thought we looked pretty professional in how quickly we set up and how well laid out everything looked. The campsite was pretty well shaded, which meant Starlink wasn’t doing well, though. I’d rather have a shady spot with crappy Starlink than a sun blasted site with good Starlink. We’re not here for the internet.

The next day was a relatively long drive to Pinery Provincial Park, That’s on the shores of Lake Huron, which I’ve never spent any time at before. The park was nice. There was a gigantic strip of sand dunes between the campsites and the beach. We camped in the loop they called “The Dunes”, which lived up to its name. It was very sandy, and some of the spots backed on to massive sand dunes that looked like they only had a few trees and some sedge grass keeping them from collapsing onto the campsite. Ours was a bit further away from the dunes, but still quite sandy. We were looking at the sites on the other side of our street as possibly a better option if we ever come back. And I hope we do come back, because it was a beautiful park and it had a lot to do.

How blue was the sky? This blue.

The roads in the camp loop were kind of a maze. Most camp loops in our experience are just that, a loop, but this one had roads going off in all directions. Some of them weren’t roads, they just lead into two campsites sharing a driveway. It was so confusing I ended up giving our map of the campsites to a couple of girls who were very lost.

Once again, I’d chosen shade over Starlink, and so when it came time for my therapy appointment (not a euphemism) the phone call dropped several times and finally my therapist just refused to go on. In retrospect I probably should have disconnected from Starlink and just taken my chances with the cell network because I’m supposed to have unlimited phone and text roaming in Canada.

After the therapist, Vicki and I went for an absolutely beautiful bike ride. It was the longest ride I’ve had in about 3 years, which isn’t saying much because of my butt pain problem.

All through this process of taking my therapy appointment and then going for a bike ride, I’d been looking at the RV Life app on my phone, that said the next leg to my next campsite was only 45 miles, so a very light day. I should have thought about that, because one of the things I’d done a few weeks ago was drop some of the shorter leg days in favour of multi-day stays from my original route plan, which basically had us moving every day. But before we hit the road, we decided we needed to stop in Goderich on the way because I’d managed to ruin the gas hose for the Blackstone grill and I thought between the Walmart Supercenter and the Canadian Tire store in Goderich, I had a pretty good chance of finding some sort of substitute.

But when I put in the Walmart into RV Life to navigate, it told me that it was just over an hour away. Ok, I know Goderich was between where I was leaving (Pinery Provincial Park) and where I was going (Sauble Falls), so this was starting to make me feel like something might be wrong, but not enough to really investigate.

However, as we were leaving the Canadian Tire parking lot and I went to resume our trip to Sauble Falls, RV Life told me I had nearly 2 hours to go. Now I’m starting to really feel something is wrong. (Spoiler alert, I looked on my laptop the next day, and RV LIfe on my laptop was saying the trip from Pinery Park to Sauble Falls was 110 miles, not 45 miles. The iPhone and the iPad apps were still saying 45 miles. Sometimes I wonder about the quality of the programmers working for RV Life.

Go ahead, put those two endpoints into any mapping application

I really started to worry about the quality of the programmers at RV Life when we had a construction zone with a small road closure in Southampton Ontario. RV Life sent us down a street that suddenly ended in a bike path that it told us to continue down.

We were on Madwayosh St and it does NOT connect to Shore Rd. Have a look on Google Maps for the real situation. Good thing it was sort of a square cul-de-sac because I managed to make a 147 point turn and get turned around, and followed a better detour around the road closure thanks to Google Maps.

When we got to Sauble Falls Provincial Park, it was after 5pm and the office was closed. So lacking any signposting indicating which way to the camping area, we went straight ahead which lead us into a day use parking area that was almost, but not quite, wide enough to do one of my patented 147 point u-turns. I barely had to drive up into the picnic area at all, and I defy anybody to prove otherwise.

That’s when we discovered that if we’d taken a 90 degree turn after the office instead of going straight ahead, there was a large map board showing the campsites. Lacking an office to check in, I searched in my email to find out which spot we were supposed to camp in. Ok, so far so good. As we were in the campground loop, I recalled seeing indications of water spigots on the large map, but I couldn’t recall exactly where they were. I asked a friendly looking bunch of campers, and they said you couldn’t use those spigots for filling your fresh tank and you had to go to the other park of the park up the road a bit and fill out there. They even gave us a paper copy of the big map. So we went around the loop and out to the highway again, through the impenetrable and poorly signposted other part of the park, and filled up our fresh tank. Then we’d come back to the same loop, and given the paper map back to its original owners because it had phone numbers and names written on it and we figured they might need those. We then proceeded further down the loop to the spot we had reserved, only to find somebody parked in it. Probably just as well, because like several other campsites in this park, it was angled the wrong way and would have been damn near impossible to get our trailer into.

That’s when Vicki went searching and discovered that I was looking at an older email, and when I’d changed the booking from one night to two nights, they’d put us into a different campsite. Ironically the one right next to the friendly people we’d talked to before. So once more around the loop, and this time into our spot.

It had been a long day, and so basically we set up camp, did dinner, and went to bed.

Which is what I’m going to do now. I’ll tell you about the last couple of days in my next post.

Definitely time to start using a paper checklist

Last week, Vicki was out of town, so I used the time to install a rack on the back of the trailer to carry the Blackstone grill. Afterwards, I wondered if putting the heavy grill that far behind the wheels would lever up the front (hitch) end enough to cause swap problems, so I loaded up and pulled the trailer out to the local CAT scale. First I weighed it all loaded and hitched, and then I wanted to unhitch the trailer and weigh the truck without the trailer, and the trailer without the truck. In order to get the trailer squarely on the 3rd weight pad, so even the hitch jack was on that pad, I had to back up a bit. Then for some stupid reason, I decided to use more wooden blocks under the jack than I normally use – mostly just to reduce the amount of extending and retracting of the hitch jack I had to do. I disconnected the weight distribution bars, and unhitched. Fine, I thought, ready to reweigh, except then I noticed the front tires of the truck weren’t on the front pad any more, so without thinking I pulled forward. Unfortunately I’d left the safety chains attached because I hadn’t been planning to pull forward, and I heard and felt a bit of a calamity happen when I pulled forward. I quickly jumped out and found the chains had pulled the trailer forward enough that the hitch jacks had toppled the stack of blocks, and make a big bend on the rear part of the hitch jack pad. Fortunately it had landed on the weigh pad, so I took my data and then got the hell out of there, properly hitched and with my tail between my legs, feeling like an idiot.

After that, I took the trailer back to the storage lot. I was feeling pretty good about myself because I’d backed it into the spot in one shot, almost erasing the shame of the previous error. Once again, I used the bigger stack of blocks. But when I pulled the lever to release the trailer hitch from the ball on the truck hitch (too many hitch words, got to come up with something better), the truck fell further than usual, and the trailer jumped enough that it fell off the blocks again. This time it fell off the back of the blocks, and so bent the front part of the jack pad.

You’ll notice I’m back to only 3 blocks

Not too surprisingly, what it took the weight of a 7,000 pound trailer to bend, I can’t unbend with a little hammer.

So now I felt twice as stupid as I had after the incident at the CAT scale, and I resolved not to drop the hitch without chocking first.

Flash forward to day 2 of our big long Ontario loop. We’d only spent one night in our first destination, near Niagara Falls Ontario. I like a short first day because it sort of gets you back in the camping mindset without stressing you out too much. Because we were just staying overnight, I left the trailer hitched up.

This morning after I thought we were ready to go, I took walk around the whole truck and trailer, mentally checking off everything on the checklist I’m working on in my mind. Everything looked perfect. Off we go, and I feel a tiny bit of a bump just as we’re starting off. It was a lot more gentle than last trip when I tried to set off with the chocks still in place, or 2 years ago when I almost set off with the stairs down. Thinking it was probably just something in the road, we continued on. It was a longish day by my standards, and we didn’t stop for much except some fuel and snacks. But on our way into the campground, I stopped at a water spigot to fill the fresh tank. As I’m standing there listening to the water flowing in, I noticed something was off. The hitch jack was pretty darn low. And I suddenly realized, with horror, that that little jump I’d felt when we were leaving was because I hadn’t retracted the hitch jack, and that was just what it feels like when you leave 3 of your wooden blocks behind. Fortunately we didn’t do any more damage to the hitch jack plate, and we were lucky there weren’t any speed bumps or sharp pitch changes on the any on ramps or something.

But that’s it, I can’t keep my checklist in my mind. I’ve got to make it extensive, and probably have it printed so both Vicki and I can do our own walk around and make sure nothing is missed.