Category: Travel

Day 2790

Saturday May 24th 2025

Our home for Summer 2025

We I left you 11 days ago, we had just pulled into our seasonal spot for 2025, it was not the site that we had originally agreed to but it was one we decided on the Tuesday that we were able to sneak into before a week of rain. The park does not officially open till the 15th but we have been here since the 13th, I think it is a great spot for us, the coach is facing east so the sun has to rise over the row of trees in front of us to shine in the windshield, the passenger side faces the river and will be the sunny side of the coach before it sets on the back of Thunder. The awning should protect us from the sun during the day time.

The site only has 30 amp power, we fill our fresh water tank as necessary from a community water tap and we get our black and grey tanks pumped out once a week, just like back at LHR. I will use our solar to supplement our power needs and the Star-Link is working well, and I suspect a once a-week fill of fresh water tank should make sense. There are washroom and shower facilities in the park if we need them. I don’t think the sites even have numbers but we will see how that works out as we met our neighbours I’m not sure how many sites, there are again I don’t really care and as long as there are not too many party creatures it should be fine.

Our friends Bob & Irina mover their trailer in on the 15th, and are located on the far side of the park, I helped (watched) the set up, positioning of the deck pieces and the backing in of the trailer, which was done by John (park owner) on the park tractor. Unlike LHR the park takes care of cutting the grass for the whole park, we are responsible for trimming around our coach and as we learn the park schedule we will know how to prepare for lawn maintenance and pump out days. it all takes some getting used to.

It is Friday morning and we have just endured a very wet week, and it is after a week like this that we question our return to Ontario with daily highs of 9ºC (48ºF) a heater is required to keep the cold and damp at bay. Because of the rain it has been a week captured inside although a trip to a Costco and my appointment for a hearing test and some blood work for my oncologist next month helped fill some of the time. A few thoughts for this blog, a new book to read have been part of the week. The issue is that the weather is going to be shyt for the near future, so getting to some outside tasks seem unlikely for some time, and it has backed up some of the park operations.

We are getting pumped out today which had we been empty when we arrived would not have been an issue but as of today we are now on day 16 since our last black tank dump. As an observation a pump out on Tuesday before the rain would have been a better choice than cutting the grass. But our issue goes back to a dump station that for some reason was no longer accepting RV’s, this is a dump station that we had used years ago with no issue, and rather than driving 20 minutes out of our way we decided that we should be fine until the first dump at the park.

With the news this week from the States and I’m not talking about the acceptance of a 400 million dollar bribe or the passing of one of the largest tax bills ever increasing the US debt by trillions of dollars. No I’m talking about the news of President Bidon’s cancer, and this hits close to home as I have also went through a prostate cancer diagnosis, the lack of an American health system that takes preventative health more seriously is sad the fact that there is not more PSA testing done is alarming, here in Canada it is recommended from earlier age right through till older and the small charge extra is a good investment. It was a PSA test that brought my cancer to light and I still have regular PSA testing to monitor my progress, in fact that was my blood test earlier this week. I have had a slight increase in my PSA reading since my cancer surgery, and I do mean slight 0.18 on the Gleason scale of 0 – 9, the issue is that it is climbing my last test in 2024 was 0.07 and 2023 was 0.04 and 2021 was 0.02. On a scale that anything under 6.5 is acceptable it annoys me when we see people with limited understanding and absolutely no medical knowledge speaking on a topic that needs to be more openly discussed to save lives. Anyone with any cancer knowledge at all knows that there are only 4 stages of cancer and some of the fake knowledge being spewed by some people just proves their ignorance on such a serious topic. Stay in your lane!

We have a number of medical appointments in the next few weeks, as we settle into our new home, after that we hope to get back to visiting folks and enjoying our new freedom. I have discovered that Thursday is our regular pump out day and although we were very full today, weekly pump-outs will not be an issue going forward. Miss Laurie is doing laundry in Dunnville. I’m catching up on some payments and my blog, it is not raining right now but at noon it is a blistering 10ºC (50ºF) so another heater day 20ºC (70ºF) at least five days away and we are still looking at windchill numbers, oh how we miss Arizona!

It is Saturday and we are going to celebrate Bob’s 60th birthday in Beamsville about a 30 minute drive from our park, as you can see from the plate above this paragraph still a crappy forecast, but it looks like no rain. Needless to say the solar harvest has been terrible and we have been enjoying our shore-power connection, along with our mattress warmer in the evenings.

Day 2778

A few days on a farm

We have taken a needed break, on our last blog we were at the Walmart in Welland ON, we have moved to a Harvest Host Cato Lavender Farm just a few miles east of Welland technically back in Niagara Falls. The first night is on our membership but the next two nights were $10.00 each, the parking spot is beside their drive way and is not totally flat but not bad, the google street view made the drive way look very narrow but when we got here it was not a difficult spot to get to at all. The weather has been bright and sunny but the overnights are still cold and where has been a cold breeze, enough to make a sweatshirt necessary.

Saturday we made a drive to our seasonal site, it doesn’t open until the 15th but we just needed to see how wet it was after all the rain, and as we suspected it was very wet in spots. We have a dry weekend and the owners were hopeful that it will dry out enough by Monday that they can move a number of trailers onto their sites. The park is on the Grand River and some of the park is on a flood plane so each fall they have to move a number of trailers to higher ground and then every spring they have to place them all back in their sites. We met Bob their as they are moving into the park as well, there was some confusion about the sites and there may be a better site available for us, but nothing firm yet, we may be able to get a temporary site for a week or so if it doesn’t dry up, we will check on Tuesday. We even had time to stop for some Lake Erie Perch and chips just 5 km (3 miles) from our summer home!

We met the hosts and wandered through the property, they have been here five years (moved from the big city) they have 17 acres of property and grow many different crops. their back yard is almost park like and is surrounded by mature trees and was home to a variety of birds, Miss Laurie got a chance to scratch her gardening itch and weeded and cleaned the Lavender row, it kept her busy most of Sunday. I spent time Sunday repairing the foot rest on the co-pilot seat that quit working at the start of our trip, I need a few pieces of hardware and some grease that I will pick up tomorrow and I can reinstall the motor.

I have also been playing with our onboard electrical, as stupid as this will sound I actually plugged the coach into itself. So let me try to explain this as simple as I can, I switched our 3000 watt hybrid invertor to “Invert Only” which means that it is running only off of battery power which is charged by the solar panels. Next I ran an extension cord from a regular 120 volt reciprocal that was powered by the invertor. Then I used a “dog bone” to change the 50 amp plug of the coach to a regular 15 amp plug then plugged it into the extension cord. Because our coach is a 50 amp rig it uses two legs of power, our invertor only controls one leg and if we are not plugged into shore power then the second leg normally has no power. But by using this extension cord I was able to energize the second leg, the second leg powers an air-conditioner unit, the electric water heater, the washer/dryer, and used to power the old fridge unit when on shore power. So all we have running on it today is the water heater and the ice maker on the fridge, so today I power the water heater to temperature and maintained it, I also heard the ice maker punching out cubes, over night I have switched the water heater off, but will se how it effects the batteries overnight powering the ice maker.

Monday afternoon, and I have completed the repairs on the c0-pilot foot rest, it needed what I used to refer to as a Varsol overhaul, the mechanical device was just packed with 27 year old grease and dirt, and to say it was more of a binding agent then a lubricant would be a fair statement. The mechanical unit was riveted together so I had to drill out the rivets and disassemble the unit to be able to remove all the old lubricant, used a petroleum distillate to clean all the surfaces, reassembled the unit replaced the rivets with nuts & bolts, reinstalled the motor assembly. I operated the foot rest a number of times to confirm its operation and I also adjusted the swivel lock on the seat as well, a total success in my books, but the inspector has not given me any feedback yet.

It is Tuesday morning and we have to leave this wonderful Harvest Host spot, today we see if we can get into our seasonal site or whether we are heading to a Boondocker’s Welcome spot for a few nights. I’m awake too early this morning, a call of nature and there seems to be a lot of road noise this morning, either way I’m awake and up at 6:00 am, we had a number of windows open overnight because of the warmth yesterday and it stayed warm overnight. But I think the noise is worse today because the air is heavy, there are clouds, and that’s all I got, but when Laurie got up she said the same thing. Our departure time is 10:00 am this morning we are going to Welland to the treatment plant to hopefully dump our tanks then will drive by our seasonal park to see if we can get in, and if not we have a reservation for the rest of the week.

Breakfast this morning was eggs, toast, ketchup (French’s) and a cup of fresh perked coffee, we watched a little of the American news, always entertaining what happens south of the border. At 9:45 we fired up Thunder and after a few moments of warm up we headed down the road back toward Welland, we pulled into the treatment plant on River Road in Welland and we told that they do not allow RV’s to dump here anymore and that we would have to drive to Niagara Falls to dump there. I thanked them and headed toward Dunnville to see if by chance we could sneak in before the forecast rain. We were meet by the owners and showed a spot that we could use for the season if it was ok as our site was still too wet, we decided it would be perfect and proceeded to make a run to get parked. We are in our site, we are stuck in our site for now but it is a nicer site that the original, we only have a neighbour on one side and while two spots further from the water it is a higher drier site so we are in for the season.

That’s where I’m going to close this blog out stay tuned for a report on out new site and how the Victoria Day celebrations were.