RVing – Rants and Revelations

Big day

Today, I had a big day (for me). My pain levels were moderate, so I got down to do several things I wanted to get done before our big trip.

First thing I did was mow my grass. I mowed it yesterday, but because the grass was very high from our 10 days in BC, the first mow left big lines of grass clippings and some strips where the grass bent down and popped up after. So this time I did it 90 degrees to the first mow, so it got most of the clippings and most of the places where the grass sprung back up. I didn’t used to be this concerned about my lawn, but I got kind of shamed into it – my next door neighbor on one side is a lawn fanatic, who mows his lawn about every other day, and when he does he does 3 passes to get exactly the right diamond pattern. I don’t want to emulate him, but I also don’t want to get him mad at me because he’s an excellent neighbor. One thing that has changed is that he always used to mow the grass that technically belongs to us but that is on his side of our driveway – about a 3 foot strip – but this year he hasn’t. I suspect that’s a reaction to the fact that I’ve driven the trailer on that piece of lawn, and when we’re loading/unloading it we leave the trailer’s steps down on that grass. Oh, and when we assembled our Blackstone we ended up doing it on that stretch of grass and left it a bit muddy although it’s 100% recovered (although we never did find some screws we dropped). The neighbor on the other side mows his grass at a much more sane interval and doesn’t try to make baseball diamond style patterns – he’s who I try to emulate with my lawn care. Which reminds me, I’m going to need to hire somebody to mow the lawn while we’re away on our big trip. One of the neighbor kids was offering a service last year, hopefully he’s still doing it.

The other two things I did were at the trailer.

I first wanted to turn my hitch jack 90 degrees. This is a common modification, because when you’re hitched up, you can’t quite open your tailgate because it hits the switches on the hitch jack. Turning it gives you just enough room to open it. It’s a relatively simple procedure, although it involves two things I’ve never done before – drilling a hole through steel, and tapping a screw thread in that hole. But when I looked at the size of the existing holes, I realized I’d ordered the wrong size tap – I had a 5/8th instead of a 5/16th tap. I blame my Canadian education not equipping me with the experience in fractional inches to realize how wrong 5/8ths would be.

So with the wrong tap, I decided that first I needed to do the second thing – assembling and installing the hitch mount cargo carrier. I had a few small problems like misplacing (and later finding) two of the bolts I needed, but mostly it went together well. The biggest problem was that the carrier interfered with the spare tire. I see an under frame spare holder in our future. As I said it’s a hitch mount, but it is pretty amazingly solidly connected. It came with a hitch clamp tightener, which helped, but when it came time to attach it, I was wondering how I was going to be able to reach it to clamp it down, and then I realize the carrier was rated for 500 pounds, so I sat on the carrier to tighten it up. Pretty happy with how it turned out. But I’m definitely going to hit a CAT scale to make sure that having the Blackstone back there doesn’t take too much weight off the truck’s hitch, because too little tongue weight can lead to sway.

With that done, I ran out to the hardware store to buy the proper sized tap. I also bought a Diet Coke because I was dying of thirst working in the hot sun. Previously I had taken some ice out of the freezer and melted it into a cup, but I knocked it over before I could drink it.

So with the correct tap, I was ready to rotate my hitch jack head. Anyway, the video I’d watched for how to do this told me I’d need a 7/64th inch drill, and a 5/16th inch tap. Well, that turned out to be a lie – I drilled the two 7/64th holes, but there was no way to get the tap into the hole. So I tried the next biggest drill. And then I tried the next biggest after that. I think I eventually ended up with 9/32nds. Again, I blame the fact that the Canadian education system taught me the far superior SI system that doesn’t use weird-ass fractions. Drilling the holes was surprisingly easy, especially since I took one of the video’s suggestions to get a punch to make it easier to start drilling on a curved surface. However, driving that tap in was a real pain in the … wrists. But eventually it started going in correctly, and I got it all put back together and tested. Again, I’m pretty happy with the results.

Next up: repacking the pass through space because I think we’re accumulating cruft.

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?))

First trip of 2026

I’m writing this on Friday the 24th of April. Not sure exactly when it will post because we have to cell phone service or internet connection here.

Vicki and I have been enthusing about this first trip all winter long. The 22MLS group was planning a spring meet up in Michigan. You might remember that last year we planned our first trip to be about this time of year in Cowan’s Gap PA, and then the 22MLS group had a spring meet up in Ohio that we went to earlier, and afterwards we’d had to re-winterize the trailer while it was snowing, and then de-winterize it a week or two later to go to Cowan’s Gap. Well, this time the meetup was a little later, so it basically took the place of both trips.

We grabbed the trailer out of storage a few weeks ago for two reasons – to take it back to Meyers to do the annual safety inspection (and at the same time get the wheel bearings serviced so we had a baseline for them) and also to replace the factory mattress with a much more comfortable from rvmattress.com. We then put it back away after doing a few small maintenance tasks but without de-winterizing it.

Then last weekend, we grabbed it again. This time, we did the de-winterizing steps. It’s good we had an easy way to plug the trailer in because with the fresh tank full of chlorinated water for sanitizing the system, we were able to keep the tank heaters and the internal furnace on to make sure the tanks and the pipes didn’t freeze. The temperature while we had it home was barely above freezing most days, and got down to or below freezing a few nights. When we finally pulled the slider in to get ready to go, a sheet of solid ice came off the slider topper and shattered on the ground.

As well as de-winterizing, I also re-installed the batteries, got the solar system up and running (I bet you were wondering why the solar system hadn’t been working, right?) and did some other maintenance tasks. I’d intended to wash the outside of the trailer, but with the highest temperature that weekend barely above 41F, I didn’t feel like getting splashed.

Meanwhile, as we’re prepping for the 3 leg trip to get to Steamboat RV Park in Michigan, we’re hearing that the Grand River has flooded and they don’t know if our group’s spots were even going to be above water next weekend. Since it’s a 3 leg trip, we don’t really want to set off in that direction if the whole place is going to be underwater. The organizers of the group camp-out decided not to organize an alternative location, because evidently everything around that area was also experiencing flooding. Last year our destination had flooded out, but the park itself actually took care of changing our reservations to a different park on higher ground.

So Vicki and I decided, pretty much at the last minute, on Monday, to cancel our reservations at Steamboat as well as the places along the way, and head on down to Cowan’s Gap. We’d enjoyed the place last year, and it certainly seemed like it was going to have better weather.

One of the last things we did for packing up was finally taking the new Blackstone grill out of the box and assembling it. Due to bad planning (and not knowing how much assembling there was to do) we ended up doing a bunch of it on our next door neighbor’s lawn, or at least the strip of grass on his side of the driveway that officially belongs to us. We lost a few bolts in the grass, and I had to make a run to the local hardware store to buy a couple more. Another thing we made a hardware store run for was to buy a 100 foot long water hose – Cowan’s Gap doesn’t have water service at the campsite, but the spigots are pretty close together and I was betting with the 100 foot long hose, plus our existing two smaller hoses, we could refill from the nearest spigot without having to hitch up the trailer and drive over to one. Speaking of that, I also remembered to tie the pooper scooter to the back ladder, but I forgot to pack the little metal thingy that lets you easily tow it behind your truck. Oh well.

I don’t know why, after planning 3 legs of 3 hours each to get to Steamboat, we decided to just tough it out and do Cowan’s gap in one 7 hour push, but we did and it worked out ok. I guess we’d had enough of making reservations. I was pretty sore afterwards, but I was able to get through all the setup and stuff when we arrived. We also managed to make a very early start. Last year I think I’d told Vicki I wanted to be on the road by 10, and we didn’t put the truck into Drive until 11:15 or so. This time, we were actually not just out of our driveway, but I think we were at the Country Max getting our propane cylinders refilled before 10. Because of the early start, we got to Cowan’s Gap while it was still light, and setting up everything goes so much better when you can actually see.

So Tuesday was pretty much a driving day. The weather was nice, maybe a little cool, but way warmer than it had been at home when we were prepping the trailer. Wednesday was extremely pleasant weather, and we went for a very long hike with the dogs that tired all of us out. I’m not sure the dogs have recovered yet, here on Friday. We tried to connect up the Blackstone to the plumbed in propane line on the trailer, but something was amiss and it didn’t work out, so we went back to using the 1 pound bottles that we’d had for our Coleman stove.

Thursday, we ignored Gizmo’s whining first thing in the morning, so he paid us back by peeing on the comforter. So we spent most of the morning in the nearby town washing the comforter in the laundry, and doing a bit of “digital re-toxing”. There’s no cell phone signal or provided wifi in Cowan’s Gap, which means I’m ripping through my backlog of unread Analog magazines at a tremendous rate. But I had to bring my iPad into town so I could maintain my NYTimes crossword streak and catch up on my 82 unread emails. I also nipped into the Tractor Supply to pick up some more 1 pound propane bottles and look at their Blackstone display and see if there’s anything I’m missing. I posted something to the 22MLS group about my problems with the hose I’d bought to hook up the propane, but while I was posting it I looked up the order on Amazon where I’d bought that hose, and noticed that it had come with a brass piece with a 90 degree bend and some plumbers teflon tape. I didn’t remember the brass piece, but later on, as we were driving back to the campsite I remembered seeing the plumbers tape in the Ramboxes, and wondered if that piece was there too. After we got back, I had a root around in the Ramboxes and found it, and that was the missing link in getting the hose to hookup to the quick release on the camper and the nozzle opening on the Blackstone. So now we have 6 1 pound bottles of propane that we don’t need, but we no longer need to swap out bottles in the middle of cooking.

And after that, we went for a paddle around Cowan’s Gap pond. It’s not a very big pond, and even at a very gentle pace we circled it twice. But it was really nice to get out with Vicki – we haven’t paddled together in a number of years. Friday morning I dumped both tanks – the grey tank was making blooping noises that tell you it’s nearly time, and I did the black was well because why not? I improvised a connection between the pooper scooter and the tow hitch using a compression strap. I drove very slowly and watched it through the backup camera and it seemed to work ok, except one trip where the handle got kind of caught up with the tow ball and I had to drop the hitch to get it free.

After that I tested out my theory about the 100 foot hose and the nearest spigot, and found out we were about 20 feet short. So I borrowed a hose from a nearby camper and completed the circuit. Didn’t get the tank filled because it came over very dark and we could hear thunder. The tank gauge says it’s only 1/3 full, but I don’t trust tank gauges. But I thought I had to get the borrowed hose back before it started pelting down, and I took it back in a very light rain. And that was it, as soon as the light rain ended, we stopped hearing thunder and the black cloud above us stopped looking so black. So mostly we’ve been hanging around and enjoying the wonderful weather. But here it is a few hours later and it just started raining again. But it’s not pelting down and it’s not windy, so we’re not all buttoned up like there’s going to be a thunderstorm.

A couple of days of being in a site with no cell phone service and consequently no internet has taken Vicki and I from “there’s no way I’d give Elon Musk a penny if I could help it” to “maybe we need Starlink” pretty quickly. We’ve got a big loop around Northern Ontario planned for later in the year and we could run up some big data charges if we could even get data out there. Certainly we need to do some research, both on the costs and how to run it on the trailer – I’ve heard there’s some DC adaptors that would run it off the batteries with the inverter losses. I also wonder how well it work down here deep in a valley. Vicki’s been using the T-Mobile/Starlink connection to send text messages, but it seems to only connect to one Starlink satellite at a time and you have to hold it in alignment as it moves across the sky.

So now it’s Friday evening. I’ve done a bunch of stuff around the trailer, but mostly just relaxed and enjoyed the scenery and the weather. We still haven’t used our bikes, which I brought along, but the place is pretty hilly so we might not get to them. We also discussed maybe spending a full day at Gettysburg at some point in the next few days. I wish we could check the weather forecast. But you know, just hanging out at the trailer with Vicki and the dogs is pretty awesome too.

I’m in my happy place.

5 Years of Pain

So a little under 5 years ago, I was taking a paddle and I had a pain in the area of my left sit bone so bad I had to stop paddling, get out of the boat, do some stretches, and continue on. The previous year had been lockdown and in spite of the fact that I only had one race that year I had been training hard and working on Strava segment CRs and virtual races. But 2021 was going to be my best year ever, and so I started out the year with a bang. Most years I had been lucky to get more than a few 10 mile plus paddles in before the Round the Mountain race, but this year I’d started out with a plan to really ramp up my mileage, and maybe take a shot at the 90 Miler the following year. So there I was, a month to go before the race season started, and I was already doing 25-30 kilometer long paddles. And feeling an annoying nagging pain. I was also doing 3-4 hour long bike rides on days I wasn’t paddling.

The pain kept increasing as the season went on, but rather than cutting back on training, I kept going. I did end up having an amazingly good season, in spite of the fact that towards the end of the season I would need to push my butt out of the seat for a few seconds to get some momentary relief, then continue on. I couldn’t wait for the end of the season, and when it finished I put my boat away and didn’t touch it until much later than I usually start the following year. And when I did, I went for an easy paddle but was in agony after 15 minutes, and spent another 30 minutes getting back to the dock because I had to keep stopping because it hurt too much. Much later in the year I discovered that with a thermarest pad placed exactly right, I could stand slightly longer paddles, but with much reduced stability so I only paddled my more stable boat on the most wave free segment of the canal.

Now the problem with the sit bone area of your body is that there’s a lot going on there. Basically near your sit bone (your Ischial Tuberosity), you’ve got a bunch of muscles anchored there, like your Performis, and your Quadralatis, as well as your Sciatic nerve, your Hamstring tendon, and there’s a Ischial Bursa there as well. So during the last 5 years I’ve had a lot of conflicting diagnoses, a lot of different therapies, and a lot of medical interventions.

As an aside, is there such a thing as being immune to cortisone shots? I’ve had a bunch of them over the years, including in my knee, in my shoulder, in my carpal tunnel, and in the last 5 years, in various nerves and tendons etc. And I’ve never gotten a smidgen of relief from any of them. The closest I’ve gotten is sometimes an hour of relief from the anesthetic they inject before the cortisone.

Anyway, after trying everything from stretching routines to spinal implants, my local pain doctor suggested I need an Ischial Bursectomy. I asked him who could do it, and he cut and pasted a Google search into an email and sent it to me. Basically no local doctor does it. And if you do the search, you find several doctors around the country whose websites say they do it, but when you contact them they say they don’t do it any more. Oh, and maybe a few doctor’s offices who think you’re saying something different – I didn’t catch on until a few of them said “we only do hip operations”. I tried saying it like “iskeal” to see if that helped with the understanding.

Eventually I found one doctor on Park Avenue in New York who, when you call to ask, the front desk says “sure, we do it” and makes an appointment, but when you fly down there at great personal expense, the doctor says that they don’t do it, but have you thought about PRP? To say I was pissed off at his clinic was an understatement. Ok, I had thought about it, but it seems pretty dubious, since all it is is that they take some blood out, centrifuge it down, and inject parts of it back into you. There’s a similar therapy going around but instead of your blood platelets, they inject sugar or something like that. I think the theory behind both of them is to stimulate an immune/inflamation reaction. But I did know that one of the doctors I’d used in Rochester does PRP, so I went back and tried that, and it was ineffectual. (Oh, and not covered by medical insurance.)

Eventually somebody on Reddit’s r/ChronicPain subreddit got in touch with me to say that they’d had an Ischial Bursectomy from a Doctor Harris in Houston and it had done them a world of good. So I got in touch with Doctor Harris’s office and after jumping through a lot of hoops I got an appointment to fly down there so he could examine me. And he agreed to do the procedure! I was so happy! Doctor Harris exudes confidence and healing.

So eight days ago, I went under the knife (or the arthroscope) and got exactly what I’d spent the last couple of years dreaming about. He gave me some photos taken through the arthroscope, showing all these fibers growing out of my bursa and preventing my sciatic nerve and my posterior femoral cutaneous (PFC) nerve from moving the way they’re supposed to be. And after photos showing the bursa gone, the fibers gone, and both nerves free of entanglements. He said that in normal conditions, that bursa is about 1mm thick, but mine was swollen up to about 6mm. He also said that while he was in there, he was moving my leg around and practically had me doing the splits to make sure there was no impingement between the bones in there, which can be a problem. No wonder orthopedic surgeons look so fit, when they have to move my fat ass around like that.

So like I said, it’s been 8 days and of course I’ve got post-op pain. It’s really hard to judge whether the pain I’m feeling right now is the same old pain from the last 5 years, or it’s because somebody inserted a metal object and stared scraping away parts of my body. But considering that a lot of the pain I’m feeling is from different places than the old pain, I’m hopeful. I think the doctor suggested I might not know for sure how much difference it has made until 5 weeks go by, so I’m trying to be patient about this. And mostly succeeding, but not 100%.

Oh one other thing – Doctor Harris suggested I get a DEXA bone density scan because he felt my sit bone was a little soft. How shit would it be after all this to find out that the pain was actually my sit bone collapsing under the pressure of sitting on it 18 hours a day?

So where do we go from here? Well, I promised myself a new camera to celebrate this milestone. The question I’m waiting to find out is do I buy a new drone (the Avata 360 when it comes out) for filming other people’s kayak races, or do I buy an action camera (the Insta360 X5) to mount on my kayak for filming my own.

Obviously I’m hoping for a return to kayaking, but I’m thinking I’m not going to be as fanatic about it – no more 6 days of kayak work outs and a 4 hour bike ride on the off day. I believe that piling on more and more workouts didn’t really improve my speed that much any way. Plus it’d be hard to maintain a consistent workout regime when I’m trying to do more with Vicki. I think the goal now will be to get in such workouts as I can, go to races when I can, but work them in around my life instead of working my life in around the kayaking.

And what if the surgery didn’t fix the problems? Well, then life will be pretty much like it’s been for the last year – RV trips with the “rule of 3”, and videoing some kayak races. It’s not awesome, but it’s good enough to tide me over until I find the next thing to try.

The rule of three is “travel no more than 3 hours a day, get to your destination by 3pm, and spend 3 days at each campground”. We’ve kind of modified it to have a couple of 3 hour days in a row before recovering my pain levels by having a 3 day or more stay at a campground. But we’ve been thinking about longer trips, like across the country, and there’s no way we’d want to do that unless we can manage a few 5+ hour days between the major stops. Doing it 3 hours at a time would take more than a whole summer.

KC2GLRR Part 2

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.