Tag: Travel

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.

Day 2774

Back in Canada!

11 days from Superior Arizona to Fort Erie Ontario, it has been a trek and I think we kept the drive days short enough that we all survived well. Of course we are not done with our roaming just yet as our park doesn’t open for a week yet but we will kick around the Niagara region for a while, visit some friends and family and mooch dock in a couple of driveways. So todays destination is another Walmart just over the border.

6:20 and I’m waking up to a cold overcast day here in Erie PA, but I’m looking forward to being back in Canada and knowing we are just two hours away is a good feeling. I also know we have one hundred miles of some of the meanest drivers on the road, the folks out west are bad drivers but the literally the east coast driver are vicious. Breakfast this morning was a toasted bacon & tomato sandwich always a good choice even better when the tomatoes are vine ripened, it is a cold morning 48ºF (8.8ºC) and there is rain in the forecast today again. Six count them six day of driving with the wipers on, seriously the April showers are suppose to yield to the May flowers!

On the road before nine o’clock after a little longer warm up, just a few hundred yards back to I-90 and east bound toward New York state and the Peace Bridge crossing back into Ontario and our home country of Canada, and yes it is still cold, the trees are just budding, and still some snowplowing debris in the parking lots but it is still great to be back. But the border, crossing the border at the Peace bridge reminded me of our crossing at the Bluewater bridge back in the spring of 2020. We exited I-90, had no traffic in front of us, a single lane going to Canada, but no traffic either direction, when we got in sight of the Canadian customs there were six lanes open 4 regular 2 Nexus and one car at one lane. I slowed down and entered the Nexus line and from the time we entered the border and customs booth we were 35 seconds and we were rolling again, I watched the dash cam to check the time from our exit off of I-90 till we cleared the toll arm and entered the Queen Elizabeth Way was less than 6 minuets.

And the Walmart is less than 2 kilometers (1.6 miles), we picked a spot in front of the garden center and settled in before noon. We are playing a waiting game, another Walmart tomorrow then a Harvest Host and we will see what next week brings as we determine when we can get into our park. It is 4:30 and I’m typing away we watched a movie and I have the golf on, I hear there is a new pope, but we still don’t have any sunshine, so the solar system is not happy, but nothing a little generator time can’t fix, we are facing east so hopefully it will peak out tomorrow. For dinner tonight we went out for Chinese at Happy Jacks in downtown Fort Erie, we haven’t been for we figured at least eight years and I suspect even longer, and the food was just as good as I remember and we have enough left overs for another meal.

Today’s numbers: run time today 2:03 hours distance travelled 161 kilometers (100 miles) we consumed 48 liters (12.7 gallons) of diesel fuel, we averaged 77 kilometers per hour (48 mph) and our fuel efficiency was 30.15 liters per 100 kilometers (7.8 mpg). Lower average speed today a good quantity of 55 mph speed limit as well as a number of construction zones, plus a longer warm up period because of the cold.

The trek numbers: total distance covered 3487 kilometers (2229 miles) we purchased 1078.99 liters (277.38 gallons) of diesel fuel and a quick calculation has us at 29.27 liters /100 km (8.04 mpg) average fuel efficiency, and while not totally accurate was we were not topped off at the start or finish I was over ¾ on the gauge. The painful number was the cost of fuel $1178.32 Canadian ($853.82 American), at the time of writing this blog I have not received the amount of our last fuel purchase discount but I’m expecting less than $20.00 so it is not going to change the numbers drastically. There will also be some toll charges from Oklahoma, Ohio and New York as well as the Peace bridge