Author: Paul Tomblin

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.

The vanishing ski wax pack

A tiny bit under 4 years ago I restarted cross country skiing after a very long absence. I wanted to be cautious, so I started going to Cummings Nature Center that was one of the few places around that rented skis to make sure my knees were ok with this new idea. I vowed to stick to classic stride, and also not to worry about being fast. And it seemed to work out, so after a few weeks I bought some (used) skis and (new) boots.

Many years ago, I “loaned” my old waxing stuff to my friend Dan to assist his son Tom. I put “loaned” in quotes, because I thought I was loaning it, and he thought I was gifting it, and being that I’m non-confrontational, I never asked for it back. It was a very complete set of the waxes and other stuff (iron, corks, scrapers, etc) that any classic ski racer would need.

But when Dan sold me the skis 3.5 years ago, he also put me onto this stuff called “Start Tape”, which is a tape you apply to the kick zone of your ski and it acts like a universal wax system. It actually works pretty well – not great if there is soft fresh snow, but good enough on groomed trails. After all, I’m not trying to be particularly fast. And so far, each application has lasted most of the season.

That year I was still kayak racing so I soon found myself making what I would consider a decent distance – up to 10-11 kilometers. Ok, that would have been a warm up when I was racing, but it’s good enough now. In subsequent years, I haven’t been maintaining my fitness in the summer because my high hamstring tendonopathy/ischial bursitis/undiagnosable sit bone pain, and also the only place to ski is Bristol Mountain, because they make snow. And consequently, my longest skis are barely 5 kilometers long.

Last year I decided I needed to take control over preparing the glide section of my skis and also experiment with possibly getting more complicated with the waxing options, so I bought a small selection of waxes, corks and other stuff in a nice little bag. Except after cleaning off the old wax on my skis yesterday, I went looking for it, and couldn’t find it. I think I’ve looked everywhere it could have been, and a few it couldn’t. So now I’m thinking the only option open to me is to buy another one, which will guarantee that the first one will show up.

Already getting excited for next season

In a triumph of hope over expectations, I’m currently preparing my cross country skis for this winter. But I’m also getting ready to start the RV season as early as possible. So far, since we winterized, we’ve been out to the trailer a few times to unpack some things, pack some things, and to switch the license plate holder from the left rear light to the right rear light because the old position was blocked by the ladder. I still need to do something to stop the dinette table from slowly falling down.

Yeah, I know my caulking isn’t extremely smooth

In a search for places where we could go early that were open, likely to have no time below freezing or only a few hours of below freezing at night, not overrun with blackflies, and with at least a water tank fill station, sewer dump station and electrical hookup, my eyes turned south to the Ridge and Valley section of Pennsylvania.

Thanks to a referral from somebody on r/GoRV on Reddit, I booked a week in late April in Cowan’s Gap State Park. It looks nice. Too bad they don’t allow drones. (But of course every drone person knows they can ban you from launching or recovering in a park, but they can’t ban you from flying over it, so I might get some footage by launching from outside.)

It’s 5 hours due south of here. According to a gardening site, the average date of last spring frost is late March down there near Pittsburgh, but early May up here, so it’s probably pretty safe from a frost point of view. The trees might even be greened up.

My plan is a day or two before the trip, we’ll bring the trailer home. Hopefully we can park it on the road, but if not we can pull it into the driveway. We’ll re-install the batteries, hook it up to electricity, and get everything charged up. We’ll leave the anti-freeze in the grey and black tanks because why not? There probably isn’t more than a gallon in each. Also we’ll hook it up to the outside tap, fill up the fresh tank and then open the low point drain to flush it out. Maybe repeat that a few times. Then run all the hot and cold taps to get rid of any antifreeze in the pipes. Actually, I wonder if there would be any point in doing this once from the fresh tank and once from the “city water”? I’m unsure if I should fill up the fresh tank at home – doing so would increase the load we’re pulling, but also would protect us if the water filling station isn’t working.

The anti-freeze we buy is supposedly non-toxic so it probably is perfectly fine to let the drained anti-freeze run into the storm sewers. Considering once I saw a policeman shoveling horse shit into a storm drain after a “meet the public” police event, I wonder how much they care about the water.

Once this de-winterizing is all done, we’ll leave the trailer plugged in overnight so we can leave the heat on to keep anything from freezing, and also give the fridge time to cool down. Then get it packed and ready for an early departure.

Can’t wait!

Winterizing the RV

The great thing about RVing is that there a million YouTube channels out there to help you learn things. The bad thing is that those channels often contradict each other.

When you winterize your RV, the main thing you have to do is to get all the water out of the system so that it doesn’t freeze, expand, and crack your pipes. And by the way, you should also remove any liquids inside, especially if they’re in glass bottles. That includes things like dish soap and cans of Diet Coke.

The first thing you do no matter how you’re going to winterize is to drain as much water as you can by opening the drain on the fresh water spigot and also the two low-point drains, and opening at least one faucet (some people say to open them all). One video also suggested that you then drive it around a few miles to slosh any remaining water out.

There seem to be 2 main schools of thought with the fresh water system. The first is to use an air compressor to blow all the water out of all the pipes. We don’t have an air compressor, so I ruled that one out.

The second main method is to replace the water with anti-freeze, or in some cases just to dilute the water with anti-freeze. The is a special pink non-toxic anti-freeze that is made especially for RVs. Other anti-freezes are definitely discouraged, probably because they might harm the plastics or they just might kill you if some of it gets left in your fresh water tank.

Now the anti-freeze method has two sub-methods. The first one tells you to install this bypass thing on the intake side of your pump so you can use the water pump to suck the anti-freeze into the system. I didn’t want to install anything, and I especially didn’t want to pay somebody to install anything, so I kept looking for more options.

The second sub-method I found was to use a funnel (or a cut up water bottle) to pour anti-freeze into the fresh water tank, and then use the water pump to pump that anti-freeze through the system. It appears that uses a lot more anti-freeze, but it also looks very quick and easy, so that’s what I was originally going to do.

One thing all these different videos do is tell you about how to treat the hot water tank. We have a tankless water heater and it was nearly impossible to find information about winterizing it, and what we did find was contradictory.

Vicki and I struggled for quite a bit of time trying to feed anti-freeze through the fresh-water hook up, but nothing was going in. We tried buying another funnel, and a few other things, until we suddenly realized there was a spring loaded thing that looked like its job was to prevent water flowing in unless there was a certain amount of pressure behind it. Maybe if we’d had one of those big funnels like they use in NASCAR we could have got enough pressure, but it seems like we needed to rethink.

We went into the RV and opened up the box where the water came in. My hope was we’d find a pipe we could unscrew from a connector and pour the anti-freeze into the fresh tank. But after trying that, and discovering that the inside pipes were too narrow to put our funnel into, we noticed something interesting. There was a bit of clear plastic tubing with a screw-on fitting. The plastic was slightly stained with pink. I immediately knew what that was – a tube to siphon anti-freeze out of the bottle and into the pump. All I had to do was to figure out where to connect it. After 5 or 6 false starts, I finally figured out that this nice little brass fitting on the pipe leading into the pump contained both a capped off connector and a valve. I eventually figured out the right setting of the valve (you’d think it would take at most two tries, but you’d be underestimating my ability to get things wrong) and it started siphoning anti-freeze out of the bottle and into the pump.

We ran all the taps until we saw a good stream of pink coming out, both hot and cold. That included flushing the toilet and holding down the flush until it was running very pink. We put in some of the magic liquid down the toilet that breaks up poop and toilet paper – possibly TMI but we have a clear segment on the black tank drain hose, and we can verify that it actually works.

So with all that done, we now have anti-freeze in all the pipes, and also in the grey and black tank. Although the tanks probably have a mix of water and anti-freeze, they’re big enough and the amount of water in them is so small that even if they did freeze they probably wouldn’t burst. Next we pour some anti-freeze down all the drains, and in the toilet to make sure the p-traps and the toilet ball valve are full of pure anti-freeze, not water-anti-freeze. And lastly, we removed another connector and poured about a quart of anti-freeze into the fresh water tank. Again, the fresh tank is as empty as we could make it, but there might be some residual water in there, so putting that anti-freeze in there will make sure it doesn’t freeze.

I’m second guessing myself now and wondering if I shouldn’t have run the taps for longer and get more anti-freeze in the grey tank, but I think we’re probably fine. If it looks like it’s going to get really cold this winter, I might run out to the trailer and throw another gallon down the drains.

The last thing I did was to remove the lithium batteries and turn off the two electrical shut-offs (I think one isolates the batteries and one isolates the solar panels). I asked about this on Reddit, and a bunch of people said I should remove them, a bunch said they’re fine to leave them, and a few said “might as well remove them just to be safe”, and that’s the opinion I went with. Of course I had to do this last, after the trailer was parked at the storage site. But because I wanted to make sure I knew how to remove the batteries before I took it there, I had turned off the battery isolation switch, so when we parked the RV the tongue jack was going really slowly, because it was probably only drawing power from the solar panels.

So we sadly said goodbye to the trailer for the winter, although we’ll probably visit it a couple of times to fix some of the problems I mentioned in the previous post.