Woke up to a few flurries but no accumulation and 0 or 32 degrees, in either system it’s cold, the wind is blowing off the lake through the trees and it almost sounds like a freight train and the waves were crashing hard. I did a quick walk around the park to survey the sitting water, and while quite a bit is left the wind overnight has helped dry some areas, what I also discovered was I need more clothing on! A couple more layers and we are off to rake the playground area, it is covered in wood chips and just needs to have some spots filled in and a few annoying weeds pulled, after a couple of hours it looks good, we will add some more chips to a couple of spots later.

As we are seeing the sun peeking through, we plan on cleaning the comfort station, showers, wash rooms, and the laundry room, get scrubbed floor to ceiling and power washed down with hot water. Every thing gets wiped down, squeegeed, floors mopped. Waste receptacles, shower curtains, toilet paper, and a fan to dry the floors and we are good to go (even got Laurie’s approval), with the laundry room up and running we wash the wiping towels and pretty much call it a day. It has warmed up to a balmy 4 or 40 degrees and while cloudy, we are still getting a few sunny breaks. Hard to believe that we took the whole day to get through those projects.

I have a few touch up items to finish the washrooms and showers, a little chalking along the counters, sinks and showers and we should be good. Rich noted we may need to repaint the ceilings but that’s a project for much later in the season.

Tomorrow is looking reasonably good on the forecast so we are going to clean up around the office, store, and the community centre. There is furniture to go out onto common areas and the floor washed in the community centre as it has been the storage area for lots of things over the winter. With temperatures tomorrow to be in the 8 or 48 degree range it should feel a little better outside playing with the pressure washer

A week from today the park opens and we got rained out today, I mean total rain out, so much rain it flooded the work shop, and standing water everywhere. So it’s a recovery day, we visited Goderich to restock groceries, nice little town, obviously a tourist driven town with beaches, and lots of boutique shops. The only other employer is salt mine that extends under Lake Huron. The mine has been in operation for over fifty years, I asked about tours and was told that there have been no tour since the mid 1980’s so that is off the list of things to do in the area.

The park gardens and lawn look great with the rain, but the temperature has stayed very cool and snow is in the forecast for over night…..oh how I hope that one is wrong with an overnight temperature of 0 or 32, there could be a little frost on the preverbal pumpkin. The coach is being heated with a 1500 watt heater in the kitchen area, the bed room is a little cooler for good sleeping, the oil furnace is turned on but the thermostat set quite low so only comes on when the electric heater can’t keep up.

The other reason for the oil furnace is to keep the basement of the coach above the freezing point, there is a thermostat and radiator in the wet bay, that protects the internal plumbing. Because our heating system is like a boiler in a house, we pump heated liquid to all the radiators in the coach, and because not all coaches are not in warm climates the liquid is antifreeze similar to the coolant in your vehicle radiator. This system is referred to as hydronic heating and can be called a number of different things based on whom the manufacture was, ours is Hurricane heating another common name is Hydro Hot or Aqua Hot, and a number of newer manufacturers. The reason we wanted this style of heating system is because we can use heat from the engine when driving, we have unlimited hot water for showers, it heats different zone of the coach to different temperatures, and through the magic of circulation pumps allows us to warm the big diesel on cold moving days.

So today was just a kick back day, as we prepare for the last week till opening!