Category: Route

Ending up

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

We spent a nice day with John and his wife Janice. We had a bit of a storm, and Janice went out in some of the worst of it to retrieve two Adirondack chairs (or Muskoka chairs) that had blown off a neighbour’s dock and were floating in front of their breakwall.

With a bit of prompting, I managed to get John to talk a bit about his team’s entry in the Concrete Toboggan Race, an achievement I’ve been in awe of since he and the other participants revealed it back in 1985. I think I was kind of out of the main loop back then so I didn’t know anything about it until their triumphant return. But they’d worked on this for over a year, while maintaining their course work and other stuff.

After leaving their cottage, we headed down to Darlington Provincial Park. By cutting out Parry Sound, we cut out about 6-8 hours of driving, which we were getting a bit tired of any way. Our first night there, we got to take my two daughters and my three grandchildren out to dinner. Afterwards, James made a fire (sort of) and we made s’mores. Liane and her two children stayed in our campsite overnight. I took the two boys out fishing a couple of times. Then Alyssa and James and their daughter came back and brought the makings for dinner. Vicki was starting to get quite sick and so we were really happy that dinner was taken care of.

After the dinner and everybody left, we were both pretty exhausted, so we didn’t think about the garbage bag we’d left tied to the door railing outside. At least we didn’t think about them until Riot alerted us to the presence of two fart squirrels (skunks) in the night. They spent quite a long time tearing open that bag of garbage, and licking all the plates and forks clean. And Riot didn’t stop barking the whole time, and probably some time afterwards.

Waking up the next morning, we were operating on very limited sleep, Vicki was sick, and we had to get on the road by 2pm. Also we were pretty sure we were nearly out of fresh water, which meant we had to be careful about washing and flushing the toilet.

We just barely made the checkout deadline. RVLife was routing us along Hwy 401, and normally we ignore the GPS and head up to the 407ETR (Express Toll Road). But in my sleep addled state, I thought “why would the 401 be crowded on a random Wednesday afternoon?” I don’t know if it was because of the World Cup, or just because Toronto is always jammed up, but we just crawled through Toronto. We finally got up to speed and were making good time. Except for a bit of an excursion to find diesel. And then we hit the border and we stopped moving again. And somewhere around this point, Riot decided to inhabit his Goblin King persona and started very loudly yapping, just constantly.

At first Vicki thought it was because he wanted one of his toys that he’d dropped. But she retrieved it and it only briefly shut him up. Then we decided to stop at a road stop, and feed them, but that only gave temporary respite. I tried opening and closing his back window, and that would distract him for a few seconds.

We finally hit our driveway about 6 hours after we left Darlington. Both us had no energy to do anything, but at least Riot finally shut up. And I was starting to get a cough, probably related to whatever Vicki had.

It was an awesome trip, and I’m glad we did it. I just wish I had the energy to clean out the trailer and put everything away.

Lessons learned:

  • We can handle a few long travel days as long as we have a couple of stay days to recover from them
  • A 5 gallon bucket is a good thing to have
  • Between Walmart, Canadian Tire and Giant Tiger, we can find just about anything we need on the road.
  • Things break down, plans change. Be flexible, try to be self-reliant.
  • Skunks are not to be trifled with
  • DEET is the greatest invention in the history of the world, even if Vicki hates it and won’t use it.

To Sauble Falls, and beyond!

This is part 2 of 5 of our long North-ish Ontario trip:

Setting up in Sauble Falls, we discovered that there are a lot of mosquitos around. There hadn’t been any at the previous two nights, but we should have expected it. Good thing we’d brought both Deep Woods Off and Coleman 100% Deet. The second one is harking back to my backpacking days, when Muskol was the only thing that really worked.

We had two nights at Sauble, and the first one was basically set up and go to bed early. The friendly campers in the spot next to us played Corn Hole and sat around their fire until all hours of the night, so we kept the windows shut on that side of the camper.

Early the next morning, the camp host stopped by and gave us a paper copy of that map, and a news letter about local day trips. I’d originally thought we’d spend our day touring the local lighthouses. But after taking the dogs for a walk up to see the falls, we just sort of vegged out around the trailer, Vicki mostly inside, and me and the dogs outside in our new camp chairs. Vicki doesn’t like to cover herself with Deet the way I do, so I was perfectly comfortable out there in the mosquitos.

On our walk around, we got to talking to one of the other campers and found out that the ferry to Manitoulin Island, the Chi-Cheemaun, can be very picky about the lengths of your combined truck and trailer. And I thought back to when I’d booked the ferry ticket I’d just sort of guestimated the full length. I dug out my way too short tape measure and figured that based on kicking lines in the dirt at each tape measure length, we were actually 50 feet long instead of the 46 feet I’d booked.

I tried calling the ferry company but it was after hours, and so I left a message on their voice mail and sent an email. And I worried all night. Early the next morning, I got a call back from them, and it the person on the phone said that the ferry was fully booked, and there was a good chance we wouldn’t be allowed to board. Ok, now I’m really worried. I decided we needed to get there as early as we could, so we packed up early and headed to Tobermory.

And just because it’d been too long since our last disaster, we discovered that the running lights on the trailer weren’t lit. Fortunately the important stuff (brake lights, turn signals, trailer brakes) were all working. The rear camera on the trailer was cutting in and out, but that had happened last time we’d travelled with kayaks and bikes in the bed of the truck so I don’t know if that means it wasn’t getting any power, or if the wireless signal was being attenuated by the bikes and boats.

When we got to the ferry terminal, the guy there just measured our rig (I think they just had marking on the ground, rather than pulling out a tape measure) and said it was 51 feet long. He made us pay another couple of bucks, and directed us to the correct line. He also noticed my two-four of Molson Export in the bed of the truck, and jokingly said he’d have to confiscate that. I said there were cold ones in the fridge if he wants a couple of them. He laughed and said they weren’t allowed to.

Ok, now we had some time to kill before the ferry, so I spent a lot of time diagnosing the problem with the running lights. Or at least I tried to. When we first bought the truck and the trailer, we got all the way home from the RV place (which had involved some thruway traffic) before we discovered that we didn’t have *most* of the functions from the 7 pin hitch plug – no electric brakes, no brake signals, I think one of the turn signals was working, but also no running lights. I used my pathetic skills with a multimeter to determine that there was no power coming from the truck on those pins. After taking it back to the dealership twice, both times which they said it was working fine, we finally put our foot down and demanded they fix it, the morning we were supposed to leave for our first trip. It turns out that each time we’d taken the truck back to the dealer, they’d hooked it up to their own flatbed trailer (not a RV trailer) WITH THE 4 PIN HITCH PLUG, and pronounced it working. This time the owner of the used truck dealer took it to a guy he knew who worked at a muffler shop, and that guy determined the problem was some blown fuses. I pretty much decided that the truck dealer didn’t know what they were talking about and tried to avoid using them for maintenance.

But anyway, based on that, I bought two boxes of assorted fuses, but somehow I didn’t get the ones that Ram uses. I mean, the Ram uses a bunch of different types of fuses, even using 3 different styles of fuse for the same amperage. I have no idea why they’d do that other than shear bloody mindedness. And the 3 fuses that seem like were most related to my problem were not the standard blade type fuses. So trying to replace fuses to see if it helped was out. Instead I just pulled those three fuses and reseated them. I was going to pull out the multimeter and test if there was any power coming on the various pins of the 7 pin hitch plug, but that’s when the ferry showed up and it was time to get ready to load up.

We’d been dealing with mist off and on when we left Sauble, although it was quite sunny while waiting for the ferry. But before we left the dock, it started to get misty again and by half way through the ride we could barely see the islands around us. Otherwise the ferry ride was uneventful, although the food they served was about half as good as what we got on BC Ferries. Also, when you leave the car deck, there are signs showing you which level and sector you’re on, but when you come down the stairs to the car deck, there are no signs! You have to open the door and look at the sign on the other side. Fortunately there are only two car decks, and we were second from front, so it wasn’t that hard to find.

By the time we got off the ferry, we were going in and out of rain. The private park we were booked (Providence Bay) into wasn’t anything special, but it wasn’t bad either. The Starlink was complaining about how obscured the antenna was.

Spot the obstructions

We set up as quickly as we could between rain showers, and eventually it stopped. That allowed us to take the boys for a walk along the boardwalk on the beach across the road. But it continued to rain off and on so we mostly had an evening in the camper.

Next day it was still raining off and on, and we packed up when we got a break in the weather. We drove off Manitoulin Island to the north, and drove through some of the prettiest scenery I’ve ever seen. Just gorgeous. It rained off and on, but the hardest it rained was when we arrived at our second private campground, Carol’s. Like the previous one, this one was recommended by this tourism pamphlet thing we used as the basis for planning this trip. When we pulled in, we almost pulled right out. It looks like the epitome of one of those check-by-jowl campsites where you can’t look out any window without seeing a bunch of people a few feet away. It also immediately started pouring rain. I was tired because of dog troubles last night, and the driving, so I said we’re staying at least one night, maybe we’ll pull up stakes and find somebody better tomorrow. We unpacked as well as we could in the pouring rain, but we didn’t unhitch, didn’t hook up the sewer hoses, and didn’t unpack the Blackstone. A hour or two later, the rain seemed like it was well and truly gone, and with a nice view of the lake and blue skies, it didn’t look so bad. Maybe we will stay two nights. At least it’s got full hookups. I think tomorrow we’d like to go see Science North and maybe the Big Nickel.

It’s only 6:30 pm, but I’ve had enough writing today. Tune in for the next installment.

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.

Big RV trip

I’ve finally finished booking all the campsites (and the ferry) for our big Northern Ontario trip. It roughly follows https://maps.northernontario.travel/best/trip/10-day-ontario-provincial-park-rv-route/15589 but I’ve stretched it out to 18 days by adding adding a bunch of double and triple nights and also breaking some of the longer travel days into two.

With the price of diesel, this might be our only long trip this summer, but we’re still planning some short ones and a few medium length ones (like this year’s version of the Keystone Cougar 22MLS Great Lakes Regional Rally (Part 1?))

Progress in the new server

As I wrote about in And for my sins…, I’m moving a bunch of stuff from the linode I set up back when Debian 5.0 was the current over onto a new server which I set up with Debian 13. And so far, it’s gone pretty well.

Moving the “alink” site took a bit of trouble, mostly because I made a mistake as where I put the git repository and so I had to change any URLs from $HOME/alink to $HOME/alink/alink. Unfortunately “alink” involves scraping flight data from another website, and currently the users of that site don’t have any flights on the other website so I can’t make sure the site is working right.

Moving the “navaid.com” site was easier, because it’s mostly written in Perl and nothing changes in Perl these days. The biggest change was that the new version of Debian uses a newer version of PostgreSQL, and a new version of PostGIS.

The next task was setting up email. That was mostly no big deal, except I decided to use rspamd instead of openDKIM to do mail signing. It took a few attempts to get it right, mostly because I wanted to use different signatures for the different domains and subdomains I send email from. I had a bit of a setup glitch because rspamd allows you to sign messages with a ED25519 key, but the tool I use for verifying DKIM signatures doesn’t understand them, so Ihad to switch back to RSA keys. rspamd will provide spam filtering on incoming mail as a bonus but I doubt that will be an issue. I left off all the filtering I used to do in postfix for now, figuring that rspamd will handle it instead.

The latest thing I did was move the news spool over to the new server. I’d anticipated that I’d have to rebuild the history and/or overview databases, because I’m pretty sure I had to last time I moved them. But in actual fact, I just made sure I used the rsync option that respected sparse files, and I didn’t have to rebuild. I did get a few errors about inode discrepancies which I fixed with tdx-util -F. I didn’t bring over my cleanfeed implementation because I hadn’t updated it since 2002 so there’s probably a better version out there.

The last thing I need to do is migrate the Mailman mailing lists over. This is the one I’ve been dreading, so I’ve put it off until last. I’m going to have to do more research on how to do it. But the biggest problem is I don’t want to shut down my mailing lists for too long.