And still it rained. Now it was cold, too. Fire up the furnace, Jeeves.
At least we could have a decent shower on board.
A very slow start was made slower by bacon and eggs, cooked in our electric skillet. It's a fine contraption but not quite as non-stick as the manufacturers claim. Typical Canadian Tire rubbish!
We were putting off the hitching as long as we could because of the rain but it just kept coming. So it was that at 11:30 I ventured outside into the deluge. When we're hot and bothered in Florida in the summer, we'll look back and laugh at this; plodding about the long grass in temperatures that barely reached 7 degrees Celsius with rain dripping down our necks.
Everything outside (cables, hoses and the like) was wet and muddy; I just threw them into their respective totes and made a note to dry them off later. Once hitched, it was a tight turn to get out of the camp site then we headed off to the dump station. I was wet already so another 15 minutes in the rain wasn't going to hurt. Yet another dump station with no water supply with which to flush the tank, although there was at least a reasonably high pressure jet that I could hose down the poo pipe with.
Leaving the park was interesting with a very steep hill up and a left at the top; with the rain and dirt on the road it fair had the fronts spinning as I attempted to get the trailer going. Still, we made it and headed back towards the 403 and home.
The rain and spray made the journey less fun. The McKesh extension mirrors were covered in rain and not really very useful and to top it all there was a stiff cross wind. However, we continued our experiments with getting the fuel consumption optimised. We really only got about 22 litres per 100 Kms (11 m/US Gal) but then the wind wasn't helping much. I did get to push the speed up on occasion and enjoyed the relative assurance that the trailer was good and true behind us.
It was still raining hard when we arrived home and once parked on the drive, we unhitched and headed right inside, glad to get out of the cold and wet.
We did have a good weekend, though. We didn't think much of Brant, but we liked Brantford. We loved Can Am for helping with the water heater and we tolerated the shopping. We HATED the rain and the cold but, as I said earlier, it's all experience. Roll on summer!
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
A Rainy Weekend In Brantford -Day 2
We awoke to dry weather, which was good, albeit that the temperature had dipped a bit. I gathered my towel and soap and headed off to the nearest bath house. Things didn't look good when I realised that there was only one shower in the mens' block, and even worse when I could see that the shower hadn't passed any water through its system for quite some time. Optimistically I put a quarter in the slot but realised that the money collecting box was missing as the coin just fell straight out of the mechanism. Oh well, I thought, it's a big camp site and there are other showers. A ten minute walk past a whole series of apparently abandoned trailers, an Airstream amongst them, and I ended up in the slightly more affluent part of the site. I knew this because of the big shiny fifth wheelers dotted about. The next shower block looked no more promising, though, and my pessimism was rewarded when I found the shower there locked up. Disconsolately I headed back to Towed Haul, determined to get a shower one way or another. Mrs T rang the gatehouse. In answer to the question “Are there any working showers on site?”, the reply “Well, there should be” didn't instill confidence. Apparently there were showers across the other side of the Conservation Area and they were 25 cents for 3 minutes. That made us determined to get our water heater fixed!
After an abortive call to a local RV dealer in search of some new thermal cut off devices, I decided to try bypassing the melted plastic thingy, to see if I could get the heater to work. It certainly fired up, but not in a good way! Flames started coming out of the air intake rather than into the burn chamber, which I had a suspicion was wrong, so a quick switch off procedure was instituted. I still didn't see the bug issue, but I should have done.
We decided to call our own dealers', located about an hour away. Somehow I ended up speaking to one of the co-owners, the legendary tow guru, Andy Thompson. Yes, he said, that'll be little critters in the pipework, even on a new unit like ours. Without my asking, he suggested that he'd be able to get a technician out to me, within the hour, because he knew one in Brantford. Good to his word, one Murray called right back and arranged to come out within 30 minutes. This was service par excellence.
Murray duly turned up, with his wife, and within minutes had the burner dismantled and was showing me the spiders nest in the pipe work. Well I never! It took him no time at all to clear the blockage using, I'm glad to report, a bent wire coat hanger and a piece of old cloth.
He then put the whole thing back together, fired it up (properly!) and then adjusted the air intake a little. As if by magic we were up and running again. I tried to offer Murray a $20 dollar bill, knowing he wouldn't accept it, but I insisted he take it for the WBCCI rally he was going to next weekend.
The whole episode was quite uplifting; our dealers, Can Am RV and their team are second to none for service. Murray was fascinating to talk to, as was his wife, and Andy Thompson was just brilliant getting things set up for us. How lucky we were to have found them.
After hot showers in the trailer (of course), we were running a little late but decided to head out to the Royal Mohawk Chapel in Brantford. It had piqued my interest when I'd seen it on the Internet and by a complete co-incidence, Mrs T had been on a school trip out to the adjacent Mohawk Institute and Woodlands Centre Museum not two days earlier. The rain started up again as we neared the chapel so we really just dived inside. Mind you, once there we were entranced. It wasn't that grand but was entirely lined with wood and well lit. Despite the poor weather outside, the stained glass windows looked excellent. We met the church guide, a lovely native lady who's name I didn't get, who gave us a wonderful talk about the chapel and some of the history of the Six Nations people. Being a Brit, it didn't make for comfortable listening and our guide certainly made her feelings known about the proposed and the actual land grant for the Six Nations in that area. I couldn't help feeling guilty. Anyway, if you're ever in Brantford Ontario, I can recommend the Royal Chapel of the Mohawks.
The rain hadn't let up when we came out again so we set off in search of some lunch and then onto the weekend's mission; Bed, Bath & Beyond in Cambridge and IKEA in Burlington. Tsk, what consumers we have become.
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 13th) 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 6th 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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)