Season Finale - Friday

Well here we are at Rondeau Provincial Park again, this time for the final trip of the season. We've not been out in Towed Haul for a while what with school starting up, visitors and surgery. Still, we're here now and loving being back in our mansion on wheels.

One of the reasons we like Rondeau is that it's so close, which means that there's not too much rushing about on the Friday evening when everyone gets home from school. It was a good job that we weren't in a hurry this particular Friday night as everything went haywire at about three in the afternoon. We were due to have the railings fitted to the staircase after lunch but the guys doing the work arrived some hours later than agreed. Then the tadpoles' father arrived to take them off for the weekend, which was quickly followed by the youngest of the small fry arriving home from school and having a meltdown about not going away with her dad. The upshot of it all was that we didn't get hitched up and rolling until gone five and, with a water tank fill and waste tank dump to do on arrival at the park, we were going to be setting up in the gathering darkness, which is never a fun thing to do.

That apart, it was nice to be heading down to the lake on a fine, if rapidly cooling, Friday evening. The sun was bright and the autumn colour was vivid in the stands of trees on the otherwise quite featureless landscape. It was also nice to see the fields in a state of flux, too, with some remnants of seed corn still about, and a lot of recently ploughed acreage now that the soy crop has been gathered. It may not be a spectacular part of the country here, but it's not without its charms.

Our site for the weekend is number seventy-two; a new one for us. The photographs on the web site didn't show that the pad, the bit where you park your trailer, was on a fair slope down away from the access road. Not that this was a problem in any real sense, it's just that you have to make sure that you can get enough height on the tongue jack to actually unhitch the car, given that it's higher than the trailer on the slope. As it turned out, it was OK and even though we needed a little bit of side to side levelling, too, we were unhitched quite quickly and trying our best to get things set up as the darkness descended. I forgot to shut the rear storage compartment door and left the light on in there so, some hours later when we were wondering where all the bugs were coming from from, I realised my error. If you're wondering, the rear storage compartment opens to the outside but you can also access it from under the rear bed, which where all the greenfly were coming from.

One of the big disadvantages of not having the trailer move from your driveway for eight weeks is that the water gathered in the sewage tank from my efforts at cleaning after our last trip had had a nice long time to stand stagnant and gain an unearthly but earthy aroma. Opening the flush valve on the toilet sent up a ghastly smell that was only remedied with the application of some tank santizer and an hour with the extractor fan on. I think I have to dump even cleaning water from the tank if we're not going to use the trailer for any period; the reason it has to be drained fully before winter storage, I think.

Having recovered from our brief gassing, we feasted on Quiche, salad and boiled potatoes before setting down to watch that highbrow movie, The Inbetweeners; classic intellectual entertainment for a cold Friday evening. The temperature was in single figures outside, for the first time since the spring, so we had to resort to firing up the furnace just to get the inside temperature a tad more bearable before settling down. We had, somewhat fortunately, thought to bring the big duvet so at least once in bed we weren't going to freeze. 

Just before turning in, we did give the hound a quick spin around the campground and were surprised at the number of people not only in trailers this late in the season, but in tents, too. There were a few campfires to be seen and some people out socializing over a beer or three, despite the weather. There are three trailers gathered on one site at the moment, facing inwards like wagons heading west across the Great Plains. They did have the benefit of not one but two seven foot tall light up palm trees, something the early American settlers didn't have, but I guess that's progress, isn't it?

We have nothing much planned for Saturday, other than to get the hound running on the beach, so tomorrow's blog may be a trifle thin. "Hurrah" I hear you say. Stay tuned for 2013's penultimate camping day.