In the past, the group had held their Fall Jamboree at the Kelso Elks Lodge, which has a fairly basic gravel parking-lot type campground. This time around, our Wagonmaster, Les, located a nice RV Park by the name of Brookhollow.
The park itself is situated in a large earthen bowl, surrounded on its perimeter by a 10-15 foot high earthen dike to protect it from winter and spring flooding by the river that runs along its edge.
For group gatherings, they provide a discounted rate of $27.00/night for full hookups, which includes a very efficient and well distributed wifi network (From which I am currently writing this blog entry ;) ), and a quality cable hookup that has a wide variety of regular and digital cable channels (For this with Television sets that have a built in Digital Cable Tuner).
The Jamboree officially began on Friday, and I had planned to make a quick disconnect and departure to join then after I got home from work.
That turned out to not quite be the case. For a couple days prior, I labored to stem a water leak problem that had been coming from my fresh tank. At the onset, I had thought it was being caused by a poor seal from the rather annoying PVC reinforced tubing I had used to replace the earlier leaking Polyethylene pipe that the previous owner had used to fashion a replacement fill tube.
After several failed and rather wet attempts at trying to use regular RV Fresh tank fill tubing (Which uses its own magical measurement system, if you need a tube that has an interior diameter of 1 1/4 inches, I don't know what its magical listed size is, cause it certainly ISN'T the tubing that says 1 1/4" on the side of it!
Eventually, I discovered that the side of the tank where the fill port actually attached had cracked. As per the norm for my life, this is always something discovered at 9pm at night, on the proverbial 11th hour before departure.
Thanks to luck and the purchase of a fresh water tank patch kit I had bought with plans to use to patch my waste tank (And never used) I was able to repair the tank through the combination of heating a flat head screw driver till it was red hot on the stove burner to weld the cracked plastic tank back together and then using the fiberglass reinforced patch kit to reinforce the repair area.
In the end my new fill tube became an amalgamation of new 1 1/4" polyethylene tubing and 1 1/4" PVC with elbows that had threads since for some reason known only to home depot, 1 1/4" was the only size the didn't carry a regular elbow for Polyethylene pipe.
The plus side? My fresh water fill is stronger than the camper.....
But, the story doesn't end with the fresh water tank being a pain, far from it.
Rather, as I'm readying for departure, and checking all the lights around the rig, I discover that my driver's side taillight has once again ceased to have a functional running light element. The signal worked, but not the running lights.
First off, a little background. Since the day I bought this camper, the tail lights have conspired to drive me insane. If it isn't a turn signal stopping working for no reason other than the camper just having sat in one spot for a while, its the bulbs popping out of their bases.
So, I go to remove the bulb. The glass bit turns in the base.
I put on my gloves and grab the bottom of the bulb to twist it out of the base. The whole base brakes loose of the back plate, then shorts out, sending my blinker module into a ADHD Sugar High from hell before blowing the fuse on the line.
So, now my signal has fallen apart and the blinkers have stopped working all together and I still haven't pulled out of camp.
Duct tape, electric tape and a new fuse, I get the signals working again, but the running light is still dead. Screw it, I decide to take my chances as the daylight has begun to fade.
My flasher module still works, but has schizophrenic fits if I turn on the hazard light button, it works normally when just turning left or right.
I finally pull out of my site, go to put the hitch step on and discover that the replacement cotter pin for the hitch pin won't go on.
Somewhere around 8pm I finally hit the road, stop at Fred Meyer's in Scappoose, air up my tires with the diabolical air pump that only runs long enough to pump one truck tire up at a time to 80 PSI (For $0.75 a pop), grab gas, get McDonalds, and finally drive on to Kelso.
The next morning, after a night of really spastic and serial weird dreams, I drag myself out of the camper and meet up with the rest of the Northwest Campers group.
I believe, since their inception, the Northwest Camper club has been doing a '60s tie dye/Hippie theme to their meetings. Their big yearly rally, is called Hoodstock, held up near Hood River, Oregon.
In keeping with the theme, our Wagonmaster, Les, dons his helm/hat/wig/Mullet of Power to champion us through this great quest of relaxing, eating, relaxing some more, touring each other's classic or slightly newer RVs and discussing the various modifications we performed, then eating and relaxing a bit more.
As prerequisite to our great undertakings, we all donned our ribbon/head bands of power to ready us for the trials of too many pies and other daring feats that lay before us :).Little did we know what lay ahead of us! BEHOLD! The great beast known as....
POT LUCK!
In all seriousness, though, we had quite the feast, my small contribution being two pies, one of cherry and the other raspberry (Sara Lee, of course, I'm still mastering the art of fresh pie making).
Our evening wrapped up with the aforementioned "tour of homes" with my little camper being the new guy on the block as I was not able to attend this years Hoodstock.
All in all, its been an enjoyable little weekend Rally and a nice lead up and kink-remover for the big fall colors rally coming up in two weeks!
Check back with me again, with luck, I will be able to post about the Rally as we go!
Great job with the Blog about our Jamboree. Thanks for joining our group outing.
ReplyDeleteThanks, it was a pleasure attending this year, I deeply regret not being able to make Hoodstock earlier this year after the experience I enjoyed with the group. :)
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