Monday, August 24, 2015

Lessons Learned and Goodbye To Maine

Phew, we managed to pack quite a few problems into our last 18 hours at Meadowbrook! 

First, late yesterday afternoon I was motoring along over some grass on my scooter and was distracted.  I broke the cardinal rule and started down what seemed like a slight incline but diagonally.  The grass was a bit long so I was going at a good clip and went right over, scooter, Pippin and I.  
The good news is that I did not break or sprain anything, just pulled some muscles.  Pippin was a bit shaken up but she's fine as well.  Needless to say, we did not go to the final campfire!

This morning we managed to clog our toilet (I will spare you the details of how exactly we did that).  We tried the obvious first step of flushing the black water tank.  Nope, the clog was further up at the toilet. Then various items were used for poking.  Nope.  Then I googled it and several sites recommended pouring boiling water down the toilet.  Tried a bunch of that but most of it backed right up.  Finally Steve found an extra length of hose we don't use that he fished down the toilet and that broke up the waste that was stuck.  The boiling water might have helped soften things up. He didn't even need to blast water down the toilet which was going to be our next step if needed.  A tip we also learned in our Google search was to fill the toilet bowl up pretty full when flushing to provide more flushing power.  We already do not put toilet paper down the toilet going on some advice from a seasoned camper in our camping club.

Our next problem occurred when Steve went to put our awning up.  We had our awning on a slant because we had had rain on and off all weekend, but there appeared to be a large pocket of water on top.  Well it wasn't on top, it was between what must be two layers of the awning!  Steve had to make a little hole in the underside of the awning to release the large amount of water caught inside the awning!  He will investigate how the water got in there when we get home.

Then when Steve went to retract our TV antenna it wouldn't go down all the way so he had to climb up on the roof to figure that problem out.  We really don't use the antenna much because we only sort of know how to use it, but evidently something just wasn't lined up correctly.

Of course it's humid today...Steve has sweat thru two shirts already and will need to put a third one on to drive home.  But we had a nice talk with a woman here who is a Work Camper and a full-timer who moves campgrounds with the seasons and that sounded like heaven to us.  More on Work Camping later.

We try to use these camping problems as opportunities to learn things about RVing...pretty much everything we have learned so far is because of problems like this!

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