Category: Rant

Wednesday, we got up bright and early (by our standards) and ate a simple breakfast. Laura was coming to visit and before she did, we wanted to get our little expedition to dump the tanks out of the way. We put away some things that we needed to, moved some of the outdoor stuff like chairs and outdoor carpet out of the way, and hitched up. We got out of the spot in one smooth motion, and I tried to take note of exactly where we’d gone so I could repeat the feat in reverse.

The dump station was in the middle of the “A” loop, on the other side of the lake. Not exactly far, but not exactly close either. We dumped the tanks fairly uneventfully, but man, the water just flooded out of the grey tank. And afterwards, the drains worked fine. Made us more confident that the problem we’d had with the drains was entirely the fault of the grey tank being full.

We also stopped at the spigot to top up the fresh tank. We were sure the fresh tank would be nearly empty, but it only took about 25 gallons before it started coming out the tank overflow. It was so full that when we backed into our space on the upslope some more came out the overflow.

Backing back in wasn’t the ideal one pass that I’d hoped for (I was hoping I could follow the track from pulling out), but it was also considerably less fraught that our Monday night debacle. I didn’t hit a single tree, and we got into a decent alignment to the view, so I’d call that a win for experience.

Laura arrived, bearing cheese balls. I made myself busy eating the cheese balls while Vicki showed Laura around the camp a bit and the dogs made Laura know how much they missed her. Vicki and Laura tried a bit of trail that I didn’t get to. I don’t know if it was good or not, but Vicki never suggested it when we were walking the dogs, so probably nothing special.

Eventually we headed off to Gettysburg. Laura had expressed interest in the Jenny Wade House so that’s where we headed first. We had a bit of time before the tour started so we headed up to Cemetery Hill and had a look around there. One thing that’s impressive about the battleground is that they put stones showing the ends of each regiment’s lines, and it shows you how crowded together everybody was. I remember that from when I visited Cemetery Ridge on the way between the US Orienteering Championships (Pottstown PA) and the North American Orienteering Championships (Dumfries VA) in 1992.

The Jenny Wade House tour was pretty good, but unfortunately we were too late for a battlefield bus tour, and I was in too much pain to do a walking tour, so I just went back to the truck and caught up on the internet while Vicki and Laura went off to a chocolate shop.

After we got back to the campsite, we put up a tent so Laura could stay overnight, and we sat around with a fire going and enjoyed the evening. Alcoholic drinks are prohibited in the park, so I had a glass of what looked very much like a Diet Coke, but also looked very much like a Scotch Ale, and Vicki drank something that may or may not have been a lime soda, or maybe a vodka gimlet. When it got dark, we did a bit of star gazing through the trees and the scattered clouds.

Thursday, we took the dogs for a walk around the lake and then Laura left. We briefly discussed returning to Gettysburg for a battlefield bus tour, but I was still kind of sore from the previous day’s trip. Vicki suggested if we went Friday, I’d be too sore for the trip home on Saturday. So we decided just to hang around and enjoy the beautiful park and the beautiful weather for our last two days. We did got back into town to do a bit of shopping at the Giant, but I also took the opportunity to upload my previous blog posts that I’d written offline where I had a cell signal. We had another fire on Thursday night, and Vicki cooked a big steak and baked potatoes over it. It was quite delicious.

Friday started out nice again, and we had another nice walk around the lake. Over in the A loop and the cabins, there were several campers displaying signs saying that they were there for a particular person’s memorial (I think it was “Rich Stahle”, but don’t hold me to that) and today we discovered that they’d erected a memorial bench on the walking trail.

Unfortunately that afternoon the weather turned a bit rainy. Not horrible, but we did spend more time in the trailer instead of out on the lawn chairs. Once again, the water started backing up in the kitchen sink when we were washing dishes, but this time after a while there was a great big burp sound and then it drained. That happened twice. I wonder if the grey tank drain “repair” did something to the stack vent. Not sure how to diagnose that.

It was still raining in the morning, and once again I’m doing the outside packing up tasks while getting wet. Stashing things like the outside carpet and picnic table cloth so they can be dried out when we get home, trying to re-attach the hitch, and coordinating when I can do tasks like turning off the propane and raising the jacks and disconnecting the shore power with what Vicki is doing in the nice dry trailer.

After we finished packing up, we headed out to dump the tanks. The grey tank once again had a huge flow, so I suspect we were quite nearly full when we had the burping yesterday. Using the shower hose to flush the black tank worked quite well, and flushed out some solids that didn’t come in the normal dump. So definitely something that I need to keep doing.

The drive home was mostly uneventful except the first bit. RVLife send us down a very dodgy steep and narrow road called Stumpy Lane. After about 5-10 miles of driving, we came out to an intersection that we’d seen on our previous trips out of the park where there’s a sign that says “Cowans Gap State Park, 3 Miles”. And then after what seemed like another 10-15 miles of travel, we came across another sign that said “Cowans Gap State Park, 7 Miles” near a place called Burnt Cabins. I’m going to have to look at why RVLife didn’t route us north on Aughwich Road, which would have got us to the 7 mile sign after 7 miles, instead of somehow spiraling further and further away from Cowans Gap until we finally escaped the gravitational pull. Looking at RVLife now, what it does is send us down Stumpy Lane, then north on PA75, but as far as I can tell on the day it routed us south on PA75, then west on PA30 past that 3 mile sign, then north on PA522 to Burnt Cabins. I’m seriously considering getting Garmin’s RV specific GPS unit.

The day started at sometime between 4 and 5 AM when Gizmo puked on the bed. Through the duvet cover, through the duvet, through the sheets and through the mattress cover. We stripped off the duvet and top sheet, put a towel over the bottom sheet, and went back to sleep.

When we woke up for real, we discovered the travails of getting the trailer parked had all been worth it, because all the door side windows were facing a fantastic view through the trees to the lake and at the “mountain” on the other side.

After a nice breakfast of oatmeal with raspberries and blackberries, we took the dogs for a walk around the lake. Thanks to Riot, we had to just sort of shrug in apology to all the people with dogs who he barked his head off at, but we met several people who enjoyed his enthusiastic greetings. We met our camp hosts about half way around where they were sitting on some picnic tables where they could get a data connection. Sadly not our network – our phones continued to do the “now you see it, now you don’t” trick of showing one bar of 5G or LTE, then reverting to “SAT” or “SOS”. We sometimes manage to get off a SMS or receive one by connecting to Starlink, but it’s not something you can count on all the time.

After the walk, we headed into town to wash the sheets and duvet, and also to stop at the Giant for to replace the food we forgot in the freezer when we left. On the way down on Monday, the truck had popped up a warning that it was time for an oil change, but sadly there was no quick oil change places in town. There were regular service stations, but I didn’t want to have to call around and see who could fit us in. So we spent the time between cycles sitting in the truck catching up on social media.

On the way into down, we’d been on a very long downhill behind a big truck that was going 20mph (as required by the signage). I used the buttons on the steering wheel to downshift and use engine braking, but sadly when we got to the bottom of the hill I couldn’t figure out how to get it back into automatic mode, so instead I waited until a stop sign and put it in neutral and back into drive. I suppose I should have looked online how to do that when we were catching up, but I had important stuff to do, like find out who had liked my posts.

Afterwards, we spent some time just sitting out under our awning, enjoying the view and sipping our drinks. Since my Facebook feed is full of clips from the DockTok dads, I felt like we should be telling dad jokes to each other, but neither of us could think of any. Riot continued his job of making enemies of everyone with dogs and friends of anybody without.

It was a pretty quiet and restful afternoon and evening, until the foreshadowed disaster happened and while I was washing dishes the drains stopped draining. I was unsure if that was just “we have a clog” or “oh oh, the grey tank is full”, but then the bathroom sink drain stopped draining, so it’s the grey tank thing for sure. (The people who thought the bathroom sink was connected to the black tank can suck it, we win that bet.) Which means first thing Wednesday we’re going to have to hitch up and go take the trailer out to the dump station, and then have all the fun of backing into this space again. Ugh.

Last year, when we put our trailer away for the winter, we sat down and decided when it would be safe to start camping again. And I thought we could get a nice early start if we headed directly south, for about the limit of our one day towing endurance. Based on a recommendation on Reddit’s r/GoRV, we settled on Cowan’s Gap State Park in Pennsylvania. I booked it on ReserveAmerica.com in October, because that’s how eager we were. RVLife told us it was about a 5.5 hour drive, maybe a smidge longer. But I know what a slowpoke I am when driving this trailer, so I figured it would probably be closer to 7 hours, including slowness and time for a few rest stops. So I figured we should set off about 10 am, so we’d arrive with enough daylight for setting up. And true to our normal form, we put the truck in drive on the dot of 11:18.

The drive started out a bit rainy, so I drove for about an hour, but then it brightened up and dried up and we were on a nice stretch of interstate, so Vicki took over. It was all very peaceful and nice. After a couple of hours I started looking for a fuel stop.

I mentioned on the previous post that we have one app for RV-safe navigation and two apps for finding discounted diesel fuel. Well, it’s often not easy to mentally transpose the route from the navigation app to the fuel apps, especially since the phone is on a short cord to connect it to the truck. Maybe it would have worked better if we’d stopped. But I’d confidently extrapolated our current route about fifty miles ahead and picked a fuel stop that had a good discount and according to my calculations we’d get there with about 30 miles of range left. But then it all went wrong when RVLife suddenly had us veering off of the interstate onto what seemed alarmingly tiny roads. I couldn’t figure out where exactly we were going, so I abandoned the idea of finding discounted fuel and just concentrated on finding diesel. I found one station that wasn’t far off our route, and I directed Vicki there. By now, the fuel light was on, and we were getting a bit worried. We pulled in and breathed a sign of relief, only to find we couldn’t fuel there because it was some sort of member’s only thing. I wish Google had told us that. The man who did tell us that told us where there was a nearby station that did have diesel. So with very little range left, I took over the driving, and punched that location into Google, and set off.

And that’s where things went very wrong. Because as I drove out, I noticed Google wasn’t navigating us there. I semi-blindly punched a few buttons and got it navigating. But it took us down some increasingly desolate roads, the sort of places where you expect to either hear banjos or meet up with Larry, Daryl and Daryl. Eventually it announced we were “there”, which was a 3 way intersection between the road we’d just come down, a road marked “private”, and a road that looked too narrow for our trailer. It also started navigating us to the gas station we were aiming for. That’s when I realized that when I thought it odd that I’d had to tap “add to route” before I had tapped “navigate on CarPlay”, I must have tapped a random point on the map first, and that’s where we were. At a random point on the map.

We got to the diesel station with about 10 miles left on our estimated range. And it wasn’t a truck stop like I prefer when we are towing a trailer, which meant it was a bit of a production to get pulled into one of the pumps, and an even worse production to leave after we filled up, but I managed it with only backing up and trying again twice, and no paint scrapes on the side of the camper. But we got filled up, and I bought some DEF since we were low on that as well. (Another advantage of a real truck stop is that they have a pump for DEF but here we bought a box of it.) And I felt a lot more relaxed now.

After that, it didn’t take long to get to the campsite. We arrived at the front gate at almost exactly 7pm. The trip odometer on the truck said we’d driven for just about 8 hours. The park office was closed, so we just went directly to our campsite. We didn’t see any dump station on the way in, so we didn’t dump our tanks, which I would have preferred to do since we did put antifreeze and then bleach-water then fresh water through all the taps while re-winterizing and de-winterizing after our last trip, plus one night in a Harvest Host on the way home from that, plus I took a shower to verify the leakage. (I was tempted to write “we didn’t dump our tanks like we’d do normally”, but as this is only our third trip, there’s no “normally” yet.) There was a paper with my name on it on the post at our campsite so we were reassured that we were in the right place.

It turns out that I’d done a terrible job of choosing a campsite, in that it was probably the most difficult one in the whole site to get backed into. I hit a large tree. Then I hit a tiny one. Then I hit the large one again. Then I hit the tiny one again. Vicki kept shouting at me to turn away but when you’re backing up a trailer nothing turns quite like you’d want it to. At one point I jackknifed far enough to put a tiny little dent in the front of the trailer. By the time we did get it in place, it was dark and very slightly drizzling. But we’re both pretty adept at getting everything all set up and in no time we had the trailer unhitched and leveled and the electric “shore power” plugged in and the slider out and it was starting to look like home again. And we took the dogs for a walk around the loop road in the dark to get everybody settled.

I forgot to mention that while we were in Ohio, I was picking the brains of Steve, who is the group expert on the various systems about the two Victron devices that showed up on the app, but which I needed a PIN to connect to.

As an aside, if you’re an RVer, get used to installing apps. I have two apps for finding discounts on diesel fuel, MudFlap and Open Roads. I have another for planning trips and navigating called RVLife, but as I mentioned in a previous post doesn’t always get it right. And another called InControl for doing all the stuff inside the trailer that you can also control from a touch screen inside, like turn off lights and setting the HVAC temperatures. I have one for booking boondocking sites called Harvest Hosts and at least three more for finding other campsites, and one for the National Parks Service, one for finding scenic drives, and two from CAT Scale – one for finding weigh scales and the other for actually weighing the truck and trailer. More about that later, maybe. One for leveling the trailer when we camp. And then we come to the electrical system.

There is an app for monitoring the surge protector. There is another for monitoring the inverter/converter. And another from Victron that in our trailer monitors the solar controller, and something else called the “smart shunt”. I believe the smart shunt controls the division of where energy goes to the inverter, whether batteries or solar. I believe if you don’t that, you end up having to unplug or turn off the inverter when you connect to “shore power” (ie. 120Vac), and maybe even switch between charging the batteries from solar power or using the batteries for powering the trailer. Oh, and while I don’t have that type, there are lithium batteries that have Bluetooth and another app to monitor them.

So anyways, Steve was walking me through how to get a code off those two Victron devices so I could reset the PINs. And it wasn’t easy, because neither was where Steve thought they would be, because the previous owner moved the batteries inside the trailer instead of outside on the tongue, and when he did so he took the smart shunt out of the box it normally lives on. So once I found the smart shunt, it was relatively easy to get the PUK code from it. But the solar controller was another matter. It was a pretty blue box in side the pass through. But the sticker with the PUK code was on the opposite side from the door to the pass through, and it was hard up against another big on-off switch.

After banging my head a dozen times while squeezing my shoulders through the pass through door, I finally got a clear-ish picture of the sticker. And there was a large screw blocking the last two digits of the PUK.

So several more head bumps later, I removed the screw and got a picture. But because of the close quarters, it was really hard to get a clear one, and there were 3 digits of it that could have been sixes or they could have been fives. The cut and paste from my phone thought they were all sixes, and so did Vicki. But the app said it was incorrect. I thought 2 of them looked like fives, so I tried that and failed as well. I then asked on Facebook, and several people, including Steve, correctly identified them all as fives.

So now I have all the monitoring one could ever hope for, although damned if I know what to do with it all. The smart shunt seems to be monitoring how many amp-hours we’ve used from the batteries, which will probably be very useful when boondocking. I’m also insanely curious to find out how much the solar panels charge up the batteries, especially in the sort of shady campsites I tend to favour.

Meanwhile, we needed to get the leaking shower taken care of. When I called the dealer we bought it from (Meyer’s RV Superstore), they said they were booking 3 weeks out, but they’d try to fit me in on the 15th. Since we were leaving on our next trip on the 21st, we were a little concerned. But nobody wants to be in a trailer with me after I haven’t showered for a week. So we brought it in.

What followed were a few strange claims from the service manager, who I assume was playing broken telephone with the actual repair guys. Here are some of the things we got told:

• They couldn’t reproduce it. (We could – just run the shower down the drain for a few minutes, or fill up the kitchen sink and drain it, wait a minute, and look under the trailer)
• The bathroom sink and the shower go to the black tank, not the grey tank. (The same leakage was happening with the shower and the kitchen sink, so it’s extremely unlikely they went to different tanks, even if we hadn’t taken the access panel off the underside of the shower and saw the pipe heading straight towards the kitchen drain)
• They can reproduce it, but only if the grey tank is full. (We saw it when the grey tank was empty. I don’t think we’ve even ever filled the grey tank.)
• They managed to find a piece that needed to be glued back in.
• The shower does go to the grey tank, but the bathroom sink goes to the black tank. (I verified it when I got the trailer home, and the drain from the bathroom sink definitely goes towards under the shower, not forward to the toilet.)

But given all that, they got it done in plenty of time – we actually picked it up Friday the 18th. But then came the bargaining. They wanted to charge us over $500 for the repair. It wasn’t included in the extended warranty we paid over $2,000 for . I argued that it was a pre-existing condition that showed up the very first time we tried to take a shower. They asked if we had any proof of that, and I produced a blog post about our trip last October, where I foolishly stated I’d fixed it, even though we hadn’t tested it after caulking the seam. I guess that worked, because they said that as a one-time gesture of goodwill, they’d only charge us for the labour, and not the diagnostic charge. So it ended up being somewhere around $130. More acceptable. We parted on good terms, and Vicki gave them a glowing review on Google.

That gave us the whole weekend to de-winterize and prep for our next trip, to Cowans Gap. Which is where I sit right now, writing this in off-line mode even though I probably won’t be able to post for the rest of the week.

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:

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.