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!

Well I’m resting after a long day, this afternoon we found the water leak on the north side of the park, it was about three feet deep, and surrounded by tree roots. We had to get the back hoe to get through the roots, a broken tee was the culprit, a new tee a couple of clamps and we were able to pressure test the system and now we held pressure, this was a major concern with opening day next a Friday and multiple days of rain in the forecast.

Laurie finished off the gardens, and managed to get the golf cart and trailer stuck in the mud while dumping the composting product, and got started on the clean up around the courts but it has become a larger task as there is some build up under the plastic mesh on one end so we will have to peel it up to clean the concrete under the mesh.

This morning was tree removal day, the crew came in at 8am and took down about 10 trees, and cleaned up the biggest pieces and ran any thing smaller than 10″ in diameter through a chipper that created a truck full of wood chips. My morning was raking all the little branches from the five lots involved, the dropped trees were partially dead so many branches just shattered when they fell causing a major clean up. There will be more clean up at these lots in the next few days.

Miss Laurie has been working on preparing the camp store, cleaning fridges, stocking shelves, pricing products, just waiting for the happy campers to arrive. Booking appointments to tour the units that are for sale, and showing the last sites available for this season. We have many new trailers coming in this year, so should be a busy few weeks as everyone will want to be in before our first holiday weekend which is our Victoria Day which is one week before the Memorial Day weekend.

I will try to be better on the blog for day 4 of preparation, this should have been a day of photos but we were so busy I just didn’t get any taken…no excuses I will get better.