Wednesday night, some of our fellow Cougites (yes, I’m inventing that word, and no, I will not be taking notes) said that they were going for a hike at 7:30 am. Did you know there was a 7:30 am now? I guess I knew back when I worked, but I’m retired, and mornings are for lazily checking all my socials, doing the Wordle and Connections, and stretching out my hamstrings as well as I can. The four of us might toddle out of bed by 10 am, but only because we all need a pee.
Also, because of my chronic pain and Vicki’s sciatica, not to mention the blisteringly hot weather we had while we were there, we’re really only good for one “thing” a day. Sometimes two. And while we were there, that one thing was variously a hike to Old Man Cave, a trip into Logan to shop at the Kroeger, a hike to Ash Cave, playing corn hole (extremely badly – the spectators made us stop at 11 because otherwise the rest of the brackets wouldn’t get done by dinner). Also, Vicki signed up to provide a bunch of stuff for the pot luck dinners on Friday and Saturday night, so she spent a lot of time cooking.
The cave hikes were amazing. In many ways they reminded me of the Niagara Escarpment, especially the Bruce Peninsula, except the cliffs and undercut caves were on both sides of you. But there were differences too – these cliffs were sandstone rather than dolomite, so they didn’t have rectilinear cracks all through them, and the pattern of water erosion was different. Both “caves” were more big overhangs where the cliffs had been undercut by running water. I found Old Man Cave more interesting because the hike is through a narrower canyon and there were some very interestingly designed bridges over the river in several places. I would have loved to fly my drone though there and video some of that, but the process of getting permission to fly in an Ohio State Park was somewhat complex. Plus I probably would have had to do it at 7:30 am, whenever that is.
As I said, there were a couple of pot luck dinners in the evenings – plenty of food and really good food too. Brian make pork butt that was excellent. One morning there was a pot luck breakfast as well. I forget who was manning the grill (I told you I’m bad with names, didn’t I) but he somehow made world’s thickest pancakes without burning the outside or leaving a gloppy uncooked core.
Friday I flew my drone around to take another video of the campsite while everybody else was lined up for dinner. As I’m writing this it’s still uploading, but when it’s ready, it should be visible at:
After dinner, the evening’s entertainment was often sitting around the campfire and chatting with the other Cougites. Some nights we played a game called Left Right Center, which is completely random and mindless, but also crazily entertaining. A good thing to play when you’re drinking your favorite adult beverages.
One of the suckiest thing about chronic pain is no matter how careful you are to try and sit in a way to minimize the pain, it just sucks the energy out of you all day, so it’s mostly my fault that we didn’t stay well into the night at the campfire like so many other people did. I feel bad about that, because I loved the time we did have together.
Saturday night and Sunday morning, many of the other Cougites were packing up to leave, and by the time we had sorted out ours and the dogs bathroom activities, there was only one other Cougar left. And they left the next day. We stayed until Wednesday – it’s the first time we’ve camped for a week in our trailer, and it’s not the end because on Wednesday we packed up and headed for another campground, Mountain Top Campground in PA. We’re going to be here until next Tuesday, making a 15 day total trip. We’re trying to expand our time horizons for trips because either next year or the year after, we’d like to take a trip out of British Columbia, maybe doing the US route one way and the Canadian route the other.
Because I bet you’re dying to know, we used the pooper scooter 3 days at Top O’ The Caves, doing the grey tank 3 times and the black tank once. I know a lot of people say they don’t use the pooper scooter with the black tank, but I gave it a good and thorough flush-out afterwards, and did the grey tank afterwards, making 3 trips on the same day.
Oh, and returning from one of those trips to the dump station, I got what I assume is the southern equivalent of a bollocking – after I drove back to our site, the two “trainee camp hosts” at the entrance to our loop of the campsite came by in their golf cart, and asked me if I was all right because they saw me driving fast and assumed I was having an emergency. They sounded so geniune. Yeah, ok, I get it. I tried to pay more attention to the 5 mph speed limit after that. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re going out to the dump station, because the pooper scooter says not to exceed that speed, but coming back empty with the scooter in the bed of your truck when your loop of the campground is almost completely empty, not so much.
This past few days was the (see title for the whole name) KC2GLRR at Top O’ The Caves campground in Hocking Hills Ohio. We left home on Tuesday, but did it in two stages so Tuesday night we stopped in a Harvest Host for the first night. Now the thing about Harvest Hosts is that they ostensibly free, but you’re supposed to buy something they’re selling to repay them. This night we stopped at Debonné Vineyards, and we’d hoped to discharge our obligation by buying dinner there, but we got there at 5:30 and their kitchen closed at 5. So Vicki bought 3 bottles of some wine that she didn’t even like that much.
Since we couldn’t eat there, we had to head into town for dinner. The person at the front desk had given Vicki directions to the nearby small town with three restaurants they recommended. Unfortunately because they were drawing the directions upside down so that Vicki could follow along, they got one of the first turns backwards and everything else wasn’t working. Fortunately Apple Maps got us going the right direction. When we got to the restaurant, we saw the person who had given Vicki the directions, as well as a couple of other people from Debonné, and some people we’d seen in the Vineyard’s parking spot who were traveling by car even though they were fellow RVers. Also fellow fans of the YouTube channel Happily Ever Hanks.
Taking the much faster route back to our camper, we figured out where we’d turned wrong and turned our 4 mile trip to the restaurant into a 12 mile one.
So after a night of boondocking, we had an uneventful second leg (meaning I don’t remember any details). Vicki drove more than half, but I wanted to take over before we got into the difficult roads in the hills. Although we’re theoretically under-trucked for the weight of our trailer, Lopez (that’s our truck’s name because his license number starts with “LPZ”) handled it like a champ. No problems with any of the steep hills up or down, and around sharp turns and the like. I never had any reason to wish for a more powerful truck.
We pulled into our camp spot and it was just wall to wall Cougars. No, not the female kind (although there were a few of those), the particular make and model of our trailer. Like car models of my youth, they all had slight cosmetic differences because Keystone likes to mix things up, but also there was a great variety of custom mods and enhancements people have made.
Many of the people we’d met in the spring at the mini-meetup in Van Buren were there, as were some people we didn’t know yet. Unfortunately I have a terrible memory for names, and so I’m probably going to get some names wrong if I try to go into details, so I’ll be vague.
There were going to be more people from the group arriving in the next few days, but already we had almost this entire loop of the campsite for the members of the group. There were a maximum of two non-Cougar trailers in this loop, and one of those was a “camp host in training”.
The sites on this loop were not particularly well leveled. It took us a bit of maneuvering around to find a way to park the trailer that it was level-able. We had water and electricity hookups, but no sewer. Because we were planning to stay for a week here, I’d brought a brand new sewer tote, or pooper scooter, or whatever you call it. It’s a 36 gallon tank with wheels and fill and emptying ports that you can use for emptying your own grey and black water tanks. We’ve found that with a normal amount of usage – showers and dish washing and the like – we fill our 30 gallon grey tank in about 3 days. We didn’t really know how long it takes to fill the black tank, because in the past when we filled the grey tank we’d had to hitch back up, disconnect all the services, stow everything movable, and haul the trailer to the dump station, then come back to the campsite and unhitch and get settled again. And if you’re going to do all that, you’re obviously going to empty all your tanks. But with the new tote, I can empty the tanks one at a time as needed.
As a bit of an aside, it’s pretty much standard to hang the tote on the ladder on the back of the trailer. I tried that when I first got it, and realized I needed to put it up as high as possible so it didn’t block the turn signals and brake lights. Remember what I said about the site being not very level? Well it turns out it’s a lot easier to put the tote up very high on the ladder when you’re on a nice flat driveway, and considerably harder to get it off when you’re on a slope where you’re standing 3 feet lower than the ground level of the trailer. Fortunately Vicki was able to rustle up some other guys to help me. I’ve decided from now one to keep the tote in the pickup bed when it’s not in use.
After we got the trailer squared away and went around introducing or re-introducing ourselves to people, I flew my drone around the campsite to try to capture how many people are here. Unfortunately my upload bandwidth sucks, so I wasn’t able to put it on YouTube. I generated a very low-res version and put it on Facebook, but it was in a comment so I don’t think very many people saw it.
Update – new campground has wifi, so here it is in full 4K glory on YouTube:
So the bathroom fan in the trailer has been a bit of a pain point for two reasons:
First, and foremost, Vicki has trouble reaching the knob that opens the cover, and the switch that turns on the fan.
And as a secondary consideration, the fan is tiny and doesn’t move a lot of air. Also only vents outward at one speed.
So I bought a fan that actually fills the whole housing, has a speed and direction control, and which has a remote control. Then I waited for several weeks to install it because I was looking for a weather forecast that showed two days of no rain and non-scorching temperatures. It seemed like every day was either raining or temps above 90F. So we got the weather window on Monday and Tuesday. Sure, the temps were still in the high 80s, but that’s better than 90, anyway.
I’d been told by people who’d done it that it should only take one day, but I know my limitations, and I also know how many times I’ve found in the middle of a project that I had to run out for more tools or supplies. Turns out that planning for two days was a smart decision.
I’ve watched a number of YouTube videos on how to do this, and they all said that you basically just need to “roll up the rim” (sorry, non-Canadians, you won’t understand) or peel off the existing sealant after you take the old fan out. Well, I was unable to do that – it was stuck too hard. Instead I used a sharp scraper and just sliced off the layers of sealant as best as I can. I did end up gouging into the trailer roof skin a few times, but I made sure to put extra sealant on those areas.
Cutting off as much of the sealant as I could took all of the first day. At the end of it, I was dehydrated and extremely sunburned. No idea why I forgot to put on sunscreen. It’s not like I’ve been getting regular sunburns since I was a baby.
This is not its final form. I cut a lot more sealant and butyl tape off.
As you can maybe see in the photo above, the wires come out from under the folded over roof skin. I cut those off, and I went to Home Depot and bought some WAGO connectors to wire the new fan in. Now it had power, I tested the fan with the remote and with the switches on the inside. Worked great.
I drilled new holes where the holes were in the new fan housing, because they weren’t all in exactly the same place as the old one. I put down strips of butyl tape over both the old holes and the new holes. The fan fit into the existing hole just fine, except I was disappointed to find I needed to take out the existing interior shroud and use the one that came with the new fan. I was hoping to avoid it, because I wasn’t 100% confident in how I was going to trim the new one to the contour of the roof. Turned out it was super easy, barely an inconvenience.
After I screwed the fan down onto the butyl tape strips, I put sealant all over the flange, and the edges of the flange. I used one tube of the stuff. I’ve heard other people talk about using 3 tubes of it, but I can’t see why – it seems like I used twice as much as you’d think, and it was piled up pretty high.
After that, I tidied up the roof, and went inside and marked and trimmed and installed the interior shroud. Tested the fan again, and it worked great. Then I had to put on gloves and fish out the bits of sealant that fell in the toilet when I was scraping.
Afterwards, Vicki gave it the full test. She pronounced it satisfactory. I’m very proud.
There’s been a couple of times when I’ve gotten paranoid about the fact that my truck is slightly over some of the weight limits when I’m towing the trailer. I think I’m exceeding the GVWR of the truck, and the rear axle GAWR. I’m also close to exceeding the “maximum tow capacity”. I’ve been assured by a friend who is a professional trucker that it’s not the case that under the number you’re fine and 1 pound over and you’re going to end up in a fiery wreck. But I also started hearing a new high pitched whine from under the hood and I started worrying that the engine doesn’t like the load I’m putting on it.
By the way, as an aside, can I just say two things to vehicle manufacturers:
You should be required to make a manual that just applies to this vehicle, not to every possible model of every car or truck you sell, ie not including pages about options and trim packages that aren’t on this particular vehicle. It should be like an aircraft manual where if you buy an option, you get given the pages about that option to insert in the manual.
If important information (like the towing capacity) is given as a URL, that URL should be legally required to still be available up to 25 years after the vehicle is sold, regardless of how many times you redesign your website.
Ok, so a couple of times I’ve had a look at Carvana to look at what’s available in the 3/4 ton and 1 ton pickup truck field. But none of the listings list anything about GVWR or GAWR. Most of them will list the payload value, but none of the other stuff from the door frame sticker. How hard would it be to include pictures of the door frame sticker amongst all the other pictures they provide? They have close-ups of every little discoloration or scratch, but not this vital information for a potential cargo or tow vehicle.
Another thing that’s hard to find is whether or not they have a 7 pin adaptor plug for towing an RV. Some will explicitly come out and say that they have the 4 pin adaptor plug for towing a cargo trailer, but not the 7 pin. And I don’t think that’s entirely Carvana’s fault – if you look up my VIN on the MOPAR site, it will tell you that it has “TRAILER TOW W/4-PIN CONNECTOR WIRING” in one place, and “7 PIN WIRING HARNESS” in another, and “TRAILER BRAKE CONTROL” in another, but it doesn’t actually come out and say it has a 7 pin connector.
And I don’t see any way to request that missing information. Which means if I do end up buying a new truck, I’m going to have to actually go to a dealer and look at what they have. But right now the trade-in value of my truck is plummeting faster than I’m making payments on it, so trading up is not something that I’m likely to do soon.
Since the last time I wrote about it, we’ve been camping 3 times.
Fair Haven State Park
Fair Haven is a pretty short drive, a little more than an hour. We drove through an incredibly intense rain storm and I got utterly drenched sprinting across from the parking lot to the camp office to check in. The rain had pretty much ended by the time we got to our campsite. When we arrived, many of the campsites were quite flooded. Our trailer pad was fine, but much of the grassy area around it was soaked. The water spigot was just across the road from our campsite and it was surrounded by a puddle 8 feet across and just over ankle deep. We stopped before we backed into our site and filled the fresh tank from it, which involved me taking off my shoes and wading across to the tap. Our “loop” of the campsite was at the top of a bluff, and it dried out pretty quickly after we’d got set up.
The site had electricity, but no other services. We took the dogs for a walk around the loop and met one or two of the other campers. One of them had “accosted” us while we were filling our fresh tank telling us about how terrible the water had tasted from that very spigot, which got me very worried because I hadn’t tasted it before filling up. Turns out it tasted fine. I suspect her problem was the age of her camper and the plumbing therein. Later walking around the campsite her husband also accosted us to show us pictures on his phone of some birds he’d seen while he was fishing. I don’t know how it does it, but RVing makes me so chill I find these sorts of encounters funny instead of irritating.
During our four days there, we walked the dogs several times, rode our bikes (even managed to climb the bluff we’re on top of), and went into town for a meal. We ate at the dive-iest dive bar you’ve ever seen. The place looked like you’d probably get stabbed if you were there after dark, but they had an amazing selection of hard liquors and the lady behind the bar loved to talk. Again, I’m RV-chill and Vicki is always chill so we had fun talking to her.
On the second or third day I had to refill the fresh tank – when I’d been filling on pulling in I’d been distracted by the lady with the bad taste problem and had stopped filling when the vent had started gurgling instead of waiting until the water was coming out the vent so it wasn’t completely full. I tried to reach across the road with our two fresh water hoses but came up a few feet short, so we semi-packed up and hitched up and dragged the trailer a few feet closer. I can’t remember if it was the same “trip”, but we also made a trip to the dump station because the grey tank was getting worryingly full. I really have to wonder about the logic of making the grey tank only 60% as big as the fresh tank when most of your water ends up going down the sink and shower drains.
Anyway it was a nice park with a beach on the lake and a small pond and lots of trails and not too far away so I’d like to go back.
Little Wolf Beach and Campground
Our next trip after that was another trip to a canoe/kayak race, the Tupper Lake 8 Miler. The organizer was Roger G and I’d kind of promised him I’d come and do drone video of his race when we’d talked at the Round the Mountain race.
Little Wolf Beach and Campground is owned by the town of Tupper Lake. Although it’s on a pretty little lake, it’s one of those “cheek by jowl” RV parks where every campsite is barely wide enough for your trailer and a picnic table. On the other hand, it has full hookups. I like full hookups.
Videoing the race went really well. It was brilliant sunshine, the race was extremely well attended, and I got some good footage. I followed the starters for the first 1,000 yards or so, then packed up and headed out in my truck. I was hoping to get to a bridge on a private road that was about 1/3rd of the way on the out and back course, so I was hoping to get paddlers on the way out as well as the way back. Unfortunately the route to the bridge was blocked by a locked gate. Plan B was to get to a point near the turn-around point, but after creeping down a very rough private road, I found the cabin at that spot was occupied and I didn’t want to answer questions about why I was on their private road so I turned around. Instead I headed to a very long dock that goes well into the river. Unfortunately it was about a mile from the start and finish so I didn’t see the outgoing paddlers, and I barely got set up in time to get the first returning paddlers. Three of the fastest paddlers in the state were together in a K-3 and attempting to beat the course record, which was set the previous year by two of those three in a K-2. I got most of the returning paddlers (missing one or two because I was out of position or doing a battery change) but I ran out of battery as what I think was the last paddler was coming through.
After I decided to use the RV to travel to races to video them, I bought a laptop and an external SSD drive. This allowed me to start editing the video while I’m in the RV, then move the SSD to my home setup and put the finishing touches and upload it to YouTube when I get home.
Tupper Lake 8 Miler Video
One of the nights there was a torrential thunderstorm. I was really glad to be in a trailer instead of a tent. When we walked the dogs the next morning, we noticed that all the tents that had been in the non-RV part of the campground seem to have vanished overnight. The campground is on sandy soil, so it was dry and well drained, and it was amusing to see that both tiny ant hills and ant-lion tunnel traps had reappeared in great numbers.
It was scorching hot in the days after the race, so mostly I was content to just sit inside and edit my video. However, Vicki needed to go into town to buy some groceries – we’d had a bit of a checklist failure and some of the things we’d planned to eat didn’t get loaded into the trailer before we left. I took the time to do a full flush of the tanks. Especially the black tank. I flushed, added a few gallons of water via the tank flush valve, and flushed again. I repeated that 7 or 8 times, until I finally stopped seeing any brown water or shreds of toilet paper. One thing about RVing is you get very aware of where your utilities come from and where they go.
It wasn’t the greatest place for walking or biking around, but again it was so hot neither us nor the dogs really felt like it.
On the drive home, it was very hot. The truck started making a very high pitched whine, especially when climbing hills. Since we’re kind of skirting very close to (or possibly over) the line of how much we’re legally allowed to pull with the truck, I’m very scared that I’m damaging the truck. On the other hand, I’ve never owned a truck or a diesel or a turbo charged vehicle before, so I don’t know what is normal. My brother suggested there might be vibration in the hoses going to or from the turbo charger. I opened the hood (usually a very bad idea, considering my track record) and I did find one bolt that looked like it was supposed to be holding down one of the hoses, and it was missing a nut. I was fortunate to have a nut in my toolbox that was the exact right size but the wrong thread pitch, so I took it to the local hardware store and got one that was correct. Unfortunately I couldn’t test whether that fixed it because I only heard the noise when towing the trailer and the trailer had already gone back to the storage yard.
Scogog Landing
Scogog is a medium sized lake north of Oshawa and Pickering. Last time we went up to Canada to see my kids (and their kids) we stayed at Darlington Provincial Park, which was a really nice campsite, but this time it didn’t have any spots left, so Vicki found this campground. It had some terrible reviews, but a year or two ago it changed names and the reviews got way better, so I guess somebody poured some money into it.
Driving up, I discovered that the magic nut that I’d replaced on the truck hadn’t fixed the whine problem, although maybe it had removed one element of it? Hard to tell. The truck didn’t seem to be suffering, though, so maybe we’ll be ok.
It only has 11 spots for transient RVs on one side of an inlet on the lake (with electrical and water, but no sewer), and on other other side of the inlet they have what looks like at least a hundred and possibly more “seasonal” RV spots. This is where RVs go to die. I didn’t see a single one that wasn’t anchored down by decks, gardens, fences, and other signs that they never move. And some of them aren’t even RVs, they’re more like manufactured homes. I suppose they’re called “seasonal” because they don’t plow the snow in the winter, but it looks like most people probably spend the entire summer, or at least most weekends there. They also have a very basic restaurant, that actually had live entertainment on the Saturday night we were there. There were also a community hall and they had some programs on for kids during the day and adults in the evening. And an area with a couple of outdoor pools and playground equipment. So yeah, probably a nice place for kids before they get too addicted to social media.
It took me about 11 backs and forths to get the trailer aligned into the spot, because the spots are narrow and there isn’t much room on the other side to forward into without either hitting dock furniture or going into the inlet. Our spot had a telephone pole just off the camp side of the trailer pad, which I actually tapped when maneuvering (and discovered later that I’d knocked a piece off the awning machinery cover).
So it was a massive hit on my RV chill the next morning when Vicki told me I had move the trailer forward a bit so there’s room to open the awning because of that stupid telephone pole. So we disconnected (but didn’t put away) the electrical cord and water hose, put the slider in, raised the jacks, removed the chocks and levelers and re-hitched. Didn’t bother with the weight distribution bars. Pulled forward a couple of feet, but because the trailer hadn’t been exactly aligned with the pad, it took a couple of back and forths to get it positioned right. I don’t know why, but when we dropped the hitch, the trailer leapt to one side, half way off the blocks we put under the tongue jack. There was nothing to do but re-hitch it, try to move it back where it was supposed to be (more back and forths), and then when we dropped the hitch it leapt again, this time completely off the blocks. At this point I said I was done, and we proceeded to re-setup everything.
Afterwards, the kids and grands all came to visit at the trailer. (Side note: out of respect for my grandkids privacy, I’m not going to use their names. My older daughter L has two school aged boys. My younger daughter A has one very young girl.)
The youngest boy (G) found that the inlet had an ample supply of medium sized perch and spent a lot of time flogging them with a fishing line. He even caught a few. He was casting and retrieving with a worm on a hook and a bobber on the line, so if I hadn’t been having a bad pain day I probably should have played the kindly old grandfather and taught him something about fishing. Not that I know a lot, but I did fish a bit when I was a teenager. I was terrible at it and rarely caught anything, and he was catching perch so maybe it’s just as well I kept out of it.
The young girl (M) is still painfully shy around Vicki and I, but I think she is warming up a bit.
After a while at our trailer, we all headed into Port Perry for dinner. The place we originally picked was too full so we headed to another place that wasn’t too expensive but a thousand percent nicer than the place at the campsite. The children’s menu portions were *huge*. My Montjaro-reduced appetite would probably have been sated with the chicken fingers and fries that G had.
That evening, the sinks all backed up, indicating that either the grey tank was full, or there was a vent problem. I didn’t sleep very well worrying about it. The next morning, I went up on the roof and blew down the vent pipe, which caused some big bubbles in the sinks, so I knew the vent wasn’t blocked. At some point, I want to try measuring how much water goes in the grey tank before it starts backing up in the sinks because sometimes people find the manufacturer has put the vent tube too far into the tank which causes a vapor lock where the air in the tank above the bottom of the vent pipe can’t exit. But whether or not that’s happening, at this point we need to hitch up again and drive the trailer over to the dump station. Sigh. At least this time, when we returned I had a better handle on how to back into that spot so it didn’t take too many back and forths. And when we unhitched, the trailer didn’t leap. I wonder if that’s because the previous time we didn’t drive very far so it didn’t release any tension on the hitch, or because we used the weight distribution bars this time.
After we finished dumping the tanks and re-setting our campsite, we met A and her husband and child M in Port Perry again. This time we spent some time poking around shops, eating ice cream and listening to some live music that the Port Perry tourism board provided. It was fun, if a bit hard on my pain levels.
Monday’s drive home was pretty uneventful except we’d had to stop for fuel twice – I’m a cheap bastard at heart and I didn’t want to pay Canadian prices for diesel if I didn’t have to, so I put in barely enough to get back over the border, and then stopped at an OpenRoads stop after we got back to the US.
Miscellaneous Tinkering
During this period, I also did some tinkering in the trailer.
Put some wood strips to keep the batteries from sliding around in the under-bed box
Put a slide-out carrier in one of the panty cupboards
Put a metal holder for the fire extinguisher because the plastic one that came with the fire extinguisher broke
Bought a replacement vent fan for the one in the bathroom, because the installed one has a switch that Vicki can’t easily reach. I haven’t installed it yet because I’m waiting for cooler weather so I’m not working on the roof in 90F weather.
I’ve ordered but not received a portable tank to drain the grey tank into so we don’t have to keep hitching up and dragging the trailer to the dump station
Ok, this is kind of long. I’m too lazy to break this into separate parts, but in the future I’ll try to write more frequently.
