The Mid-Week Dash - Day 1

Tent City  - Look! It matches my Towel!

I'm a little tardy with the publication of the this the latest episode of the adventures of the meandering toads, but that's what happens when you don't make the time to dash off your notes as things are happening. I blame the tadpoles.

Anyway, a quick run down to Rondeau Provincial Park was what we had planned, midweek this time, to catch up with some friends who were camping there with their grand-children. According to Accuweather, Monday was to be dry and warm; always a good forecast for day one. Unfortunately there were big gobs of rain falling as we packed and hitched up, not so much as to even call it a shower, but there was enough water on the road for the spray to cover both Towed Haul and the Toadmobile in a fine coating of road grime as we motored.

We never travel with much fresh water on board, preferring to fill at our destination before we set up camp. Monday afternoon at the Park saw me waiting for someone else to fill first, and that took a while because the fellow was struggling to get the water into his tank. I know from experience that end of the water supply hose is truncated with a big, brass hose thread and that doesn't fit into the fresh water tank filler pipe, so I always carry a short length of garden hose with a coupler to fit onto the brass hose thread. He was having to hold the end of the supply hose to his filler pipe and was putting almost as much water on the road as he was in his tank. Being Canadian, he was far too polite to ask to borrow my bit of hose pipe, but I was too stupid to offer him a loan of it. Doh! Mind you, he did remark on what a good idea the garden hose was; I do have them occasionally.

We were booked on site 63, a new one for us, and we were disappointed to see the slope we needed to negotiate to get Towed Haul backed up and into position. What was more, what I thought was going to be an easy back up turned out to be a nightmare as I couldn't see a thing as I positioned for the push back. There was just too much foliage everywhere. After a couple of abortive attempts, I came out and approached the site from the right, which is not the optimum way of doing it in a left-hand drive car, but we sorted it in the end. The slope onto the site meant that the hitch on the car was high relative to the trailer and I was concerned that I'd not be able to lift the trailer high enough on the tongue jack to get it off the hitch ball. I hear you saying "just stick a couple of bits of wood under the jack to gain some extra height", which would be fine except that we'd then never have been able to lower the front of the trailer enough to get it level if we did that. As it was, I had to leave the metal "foot" off the tongue jack, knowing that I needed full depression at the front to get the trailer level. We did get the trailer off the hitch ball, but it was close.

Then we had the setting up to negotiate. Normally we do this quickly and efficiently but today we had the tadpoles and the hound and that, dear readers, really throws a spanner in the works. For this trip, the big tadpole had come equipped with a tent and, in a moment of rashness on my part, I said that he should put it up whilst we were unhitching. What I hadn't counted on was that I'd stowed the tent in the trailer and that he'd require help to get the tent set up. We did get everything set eventually but the process took an age whilst the tent appeared to take priority; darned tadpoles!

Then the thunderstorms started. Not too bad on that Monday evening but I was wondering if anyone at Accuweather had actually looked out of the window.

We did at least locate our friends and had a beer or two in their company, which was nice. The morrow looked a little stormy but hey, that's camping!