We’ve been at the same campground since the middle of October. We had no intention to stop at this campground, but fortunately, we broke down about thirty miles away and they’ve been good to us. We have nice neighbors, they bring us firewood and take us to the store, and the campground has been working with us to let us stay until get our transmission gets fixed. We are hoping to get out of here soon, but it won’t happen until weather is permitting.
Our transmission is done, its ready to be installed, we just need to get to the shop on a day when the weather is warmer and the roads tolerable. We almost went today, but we don’t know how long they will take to install it and its supposed to be freezing rain tomorrow. If we were stuck there overnight because they ran into some problem, then we’d have been stuck in the mechanic’s parking lot waiting for it to get finished.
I had hoped to get out of here this weekend, but the weather is not in our favor. Next week it is supposed to be cold again, so hopefully the week after that we can get it taken care of. We might have to pay for another few days, but it would be nice to be out of here before February rolls around. We can afford it, but we are both getting sick of this campground and being stuck in the RV on cold days.
About this campground though, we’ve had a couple of issues though most of it has been good. First we had a leaking water hose. It was leaking at the spot where the water goes into the RV, so we had built up a large flow of ice from the leak. We borrowed another hose from our neighbors, but we didn’t have enough heat tape for that, so we gave it back to them when it started getting colder again. We don’t currently have shore water, but we do have our fresh water tank that was pretty much full, so we’ve been using that for things. We aren’t drinking it though, we’ll have to sanitize it, but its fine for washing dishes and hands as well as flushing the toilet. I’m not sure how much water is in there, but it was full before we started using it so we should have enough to last awhile.
Then, since we hadn’t taken the hose of the faucet, but disconnected at RV instead, it cracked the pipe. So even if we had enough hose to get to our RV, we wouldn’t be able to use it anyway. We’ll have to get our own 10 foot hose when we can afford it so we can hook back up to city water.
The black tank was also frozen, but its mostly thawed now. I had to wrap the heat tape around the black tank pipe to thaw it enough to let us drain the black tank a bit, but it hasn’t drained it completely. Another thing for us to purchase, in this case some septic tank digester. I’m afraid the length of time frozen and thawing and refreezing has done chaos to the tank, so we probably have to put some digester down there and hope it chews away at the toilet paper to let it drain completely.
As for our neighbors, they’ve been great. We don’t have anyone within two spaces of us, so we’ve had plenty of privacy. We’ve met and gotten rides from three of our neighbors. The campground employees have been great as well too. They haven’t complained about us staying so long and they’ve been bringing us the packages we have been getting delivered here.
And as for deliveries, we have a washing machine coming tomorrow. Its not very big and can’t do a lot of clothes at once, but the campground laundry has been closed for over a month now, so any laundry we can get done will be incredible. We’ve been hand washing some clothes so we have some clean, but hopefully when we have the washing machine, we can just do our load or laundry once a day and keep caught up. If we can do that every day, we should be doing alright. If we can do the same with dishes, we’ll be set.
Now, as for some things this predicament has taught us, well, we’ve learned some things. Before, we would leave the campground once or twice a week to go grocery shopping or just to get out of town. The big problem with this is that it is a pain in the ass to drive a 33 foot RV around. So instead we’ve gotten better at managing our finances and food supplies. We still need to work on things, but we’ve learned to make plans for meals to make and buy enough to last us at least a week. Since our membership at Thousand Trails gives us two weeks to stay with a week off before going to the next campground, this works well. If we can buy everything before we stop at a campground we can have our two weeks here be a little more calm and prepared and not have to worry about leaving in the middle of things.
The second thing that we have learned is that we really need a tow vehicle. It doesn’t have to be anything large, but we need something to be able to at least get us to town and get out of the campground for a bit. We’d like something small, maybe just a moped, but can’t afford one now. We definitely don’t want a car since that would be an extra expense in insurance, gas, maintenance, and it would be much more trouble trying to tow it anyway. We could probably get a mount for the back of the RV and just put one moped on it and be good. That would give us the ability to get out of the park, it would be cheap to insure, and we wouldn’t be required to manage with neighbors on getting rides to the store.
We don’t plan on staying anywhere for more than two weeks, but then, we also never planned on staying here for over three months. If we can at least have some way to run into town if we need to, things will be better. We probably can’t buy much for groceries on a moped, but at least be able to get some stuff and get a change of scenery. If we get one with a small enough engine, we won’t even need a motorcycle license. So that’s a win all around. We can probably find a moped for under $500, but that’s an expense that will have to wait. Add that to the list of things we’d like to build.
So there we are things we have learned, things we need to do better, and things we would like to buy. It hasn’t been that bad being here, but its getting old. It would be nice to have a change of scenery for awhile. We also haven’t driven in three months, and like I have said to others who stay put for long periods of time, we have wheels on our home, they are meant to be used.
