Category: Revelation

Adirondak Weekend

Last weekend (May 9-11) we did an RV trip to the Lake Placid/Saranac Lake area. Originally I’d planned to just do it on my own, because my main purpose for doing it was so I could shoot some drone footage at the ‘Round The Mountain Canoe/Kayak Race. They should probably rename that, because it’s not just canoes and kayaks, it’s also pack boats (a canoe-like boat with a lot of tumblehome so it’s paddled with a kayak paddle – most of them are made by Placid Boat Works) and guide boats (a bigger boat, rowed by one person, and sometimes with a person in the stern with a canoe paddle, based on the boats that Adirondak guides used a hundred years ago) and stand up paddle boards. I thought Vicki would be bored if I dragged her along but not only did she come on the trip, but she came to the race as well.

Anyway, we had a rainy drive up on Friday. RVLife once again tried to kill us by trying to route us via an illegal U-turn on a divided highway with almost no median between the directions, just a gap in the fence and a “No U-turns except emergency vehicles” sign. It’s funny, because mere minutes before this we passed an exit that I said “I normally go off here when using Google or Apple Maps, I wonder why RVLife is having us miss it?”

We arrived at the campground just a few minutes late for a normal check in. Some of the KOA people were still hanging around the late check in desk and handed us our mirror tag and camp map with the route to our campsite helpfully drawn in. It was a pull-through site, full service. Something we haven’t had yet this year. I pulled through, and checked our trailer location and declared it in proper position, so we set about leveling and unhitching and putting down the jacks and out the slides. But when it came time to hook up the water service, I discovered that the thing I’d thought was the water spigot was just some other piece of infrastructure, and the spigot was actually on the backside of the electrical post. And wouldn’t you know it, the water hose ended up being 4 feet short. Oh well, I thought, it’s a pain but I guess we’ll have to hitch up again and move the trailer back 4 feet.

That’s when disaster struck. The front set of jacks wouldn’t retract. The relay made a click, but there was no motor sound. So now we’ve got two problems, and no easy way to fix them. The Facebook technical guru Steve was also camping, and both of us had intermittent 1 dot of signal. But he said to try resetting everything, but that didn’t work. Also it turned out that the manual retraction of the jacks uses a proprietary connection, and evidently we didn’t get one with our trailer, or misplaced it. So we decided that we had to get some more drinking water hose.

We drove into Lake Placid and Saranac Lake, and didn’t find any place selling garden hose. We did stop at a grocery store and bought some bottled water to tide us through the night, and we just didn’t do any dishes and went to the camp toilets when necessary. Normally I like to travel with 5-10 gallons or so in the fresh water tank, but I forgot to fill it this time.

The rain finally stopped at some point in the night, which made me happy about the possibilities of being able to fly my drones, although the race has a history of dawning sunny and light winds, and it whipping up to a gale and rain just a few minutes before start time.

Next morning, the KOA camp store opened at 9, and they had drinking water hose. So we got the trailer hooked up and were able to flush toilets and wash dishes again. That was one burden off my mind. Also got to try the new Rhino Adaptor Pro – I’d been searching all over the internet for one of these things after they got announced this spring, and finally got one last week by driving 40 minutes away to a Walmart that had two of them. It’s everything I’d hoped – it makes a good water and smell tight seal with the sewage connection so you don’t have to pile rocks or sandbags to keep the “stinky slinky” from slipping out.

Unfortunately we didn’t pay attention to the time and we ended up leaving the campground just slightly too late to make the start of the race, so I headed straight to the one and only place where the race goes under a road bridge, on Rte 3 between First Pond and Second Pond. We parked up there and I trudged into the woods and set up to launch and retrieve my drone there. And really none too early, because the first paddlers showed up about 15-20 minutes later.

Uncharacteristically for ‘Round The Mountain, the weather stayed good for the whole race, with very little wind and no rain. It was overcast, which is a slight bummer because I love the video you get when it’s blue skies and sunny.

Like I said, I set up kind of in the wood where I had a good view over First Pond, but there was somebody else with a drone on or near the bridge, and sometimes I got thrown off by the sound of a drone coming from my right when I knew my drone was to my left. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered that before.

I spent nearly an hour videoing there, until I saw what I assumed was a sweeper boat. In my racing days, I was always up near the pointy end of the race, and I was pretty much laser focused on one or two other kayaks who I’d consider rivals, and every other boat out there was just an obstacle to pass or a potential wake to try to ride. So I was kind of amazed how many boats there were in the race, especially how many pack boats.

After that, we drove down to the finish and I did some more videoing there. I didn’t stay to the end there. But I got another half hour or so of video, and then packed up my drone. Met some old friends who were in the race, and invited them out to dinner.

Before dinner we went back to the campsite to rest up and change. I also spend some time working on the level problem. Did some googling, and found a document about setting up the In-Command system, which controls all the fancy stuff on the trailer, like the lights and the jacks and the furnace. And it described a way of manually extending and retracting the levels using a rotary switch and button on the In-Command circuit board. What I didn’t realize was that this method still used the relay, but sometimes ignorance is bliss because on the second attempt I got this button to actually retract the front jacks. Just after I did that, Steve came back on-line long enough to tell me that my problem was probably a relay, and the In-Command circuit board has a couple of spare relays below the in-use relays. I swapped the relay and now I could extend and retract the jacks with the app, and suddenly I wasn’t worried about anything any more.

We went out for dinner with Roger and Jim and Kim. It was a new brew-pub place in Saranac Lake and very popular, so there was a long wait to get seated – but interestingly enough, the wait list was managed in the Yelp app which told you how many people were ahead of you and your expected seating time. The food was excellent, and the beers on tap were pretty good, although Jim didn’t like his and switched to a Bud Lite. Can’t fault a guy for knowing what he likes, but he was pretty annoyed that they didn’t comp him the beer he didn’t like and only drank a few sips from.

Next morning was blue skies and sunshine, although the wind was a little higher. I was tempted to send the drone up to get pictures of the campground, but I figured I had enough video editing to do and I didn’t need to do any more. Plus Vicki had taken a bunch of pictures.

The drive home was also uneventful and more pleasant than the drive out. And RVLife didn’t try to kill us this time.

It’s now Friday, and in that time I’ve only managed to edit the First Pond footage. I still have the finish line footage to deal with. I was going to make one long video but I decided it had been long enough so I duplicated the project and cut off the unedited second part and uploaded that to YouTube. It isn’t terrible, if I do say so myself.

Tuesday at Cowan’s Gap

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.

On to Cowan’s Gap

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.

Between Trips

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:

A picture from our first trip in October 2024.
  • 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.

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.