A Wet Weekend In Brantford - Day 1

Not quite a rainy night in Georgia but it's a good as we could get in Southern Ontario.

Friday afternoon and it's time to go. One day we'll get this hitching lark sorted out; it still takes us ages to do it all. Still, we were ready to roll by 5pm so it wasn't too bad. First failure of the day (it being Friday 13^th) was that all the Guinness at the Beer Store was way out of date. By months in fact. I had to settle for domestic stuff and was a little miffed, although the Sleemans Honey Brown is quite a good alternative.

We headed out in the rush hour traffic and made a path for Highway 401 and Brantford. Although there was a lot of traffic, it was all moving and as we like to stay within the speed limit, we were the slowest vehicle on the road (speed limits here tend to be little more than a vague suggestion). That said, it's quite satisfying to have everyone else having to pass you. Once up to speed, I spent a lot of the time experimenting with transmission settings and the use of Cruise Control. The Sienna has a very nice TipTronic gearbox where you can limit which gears you use rather than just letting the gearbox decide; I eventually settled on 6^th but no cruise control, keeping at around 100km/h, which stopped the gearbox constantly changing the gear. Mind you, at that speed, the gas consumption is a bit scary.

The run up the 401, then the 403, was quite uneventful and we even overtook a couple of vehicles on the way, much to my suprise. I do enjoy confusing the SatNav so I came off the 403 a little sooner than the device had suggested, in order to avoid some construction; “Turn around” was all it's strangulated computer voice could say!

The day had been very warm and muggy, with the promise of thunderstorms, so we weren't too surprised to see the dark black clouds, seemingly hovering over our destination and spouting the occasional fork of lightning. Sure enough, the rain started just as we arrived at the Brant Conservation Area, although as we splashed through the puddles to the camp site, we realised that it had been raining for a while here. Of the past four weekends we had been camping on three of them. The only dry weekend was the one we were at home! Now tell me we're not fated.

Brant Conservation area is quite big, on a bend in the Grand River. There are a lot of camp sites with many seasonal pitches, as we discovered as we rolled into what can only be described as a shanty town of old, decaying trailers, each with its own home made deck and pile of firewood outside. Most looked abandoned but most also had lights on and cars outside; very odd. Our little site was quite tight with a couple of trees obstructing the access a bit, albeit that the pad was level and made of gravel. Mrs T suggested that we do a pull through manoeuvre, even though it wasn't a pull through site, so off across the long grass I headed. Actually, it was a sensible move because as the rain came down we parked, unhitched and set up in about ten minutes; rain will do that for you.

This was our first pitch with water supplied so it was a nice feeling to connect the trailer up and not be relying on the fresh water tank on board.

The rain did stop for a while but it wasn't sitting outside weather so we had our baked potato and beans indoors and thought about retiring. Then I decided to try the hot water. Oops! No hot water. The monitor light was off, too. A quick trip outside with the Mag Light and I checked that the propane; it was on, but there didn't appear to be any flow, even to the stove. I thought I'd better have a look at the water heater compartment on the outside of the trailer and there the problem was obvious. Oh dear, I thought, as I saw the mass of burnt plastic between two bits of wire, that looks terminal.

Given that it was dark and raining, I repaired to the trailer and Mrs Toad and I set about reading the manuals. It seemed that the burned plastic was the remains of the Thermal Cut Off device, designed to cut all power and gas when a failure in the water heater is detected. That would account for the non-working water heater and the lack of LPG, then.  The book said that this occurred often when bugs had set up home in the heater and blocked some important pipe or other. I felt sure that as our unit was only a few weeks old that bugs couldn't be the issue but realised that there wasn't much we could do that evening. So, the washing up was done with boiled water from the kettle, which was no big deal; it looked like the shower block for us in the morning.

My one notable success of the evening was getting the LPG working on the stove again. What a clever toad I am.

We decided to turn in for the night as the rain started it's rhythm on the roof again. It was warm at least so the furnace stayed off, for the first time on any of our trips, and we settled down with hopes of a better and busy day tomorrow.