Open for business!

Well, our campground officially opens for business this afternoon. It's not totally ready, but most of the items not ready are beyond our control.

That's okay though, because it's not going to be busy. In fact, we don't have any reservations. Although there will be some of the seasonal campers here for the long weekend.

One of the reasons we're not ready is simply a time factor. There is usually almost three weeks between May 1st and opening day. This year, the long weekend is the earliest it can be, and it meant only two full weeks to get things ready.

Second reason is mostly related to water.

We have five washroom buildings here, each containing a men's shower, toilet, and sink and a women's shower, toilet and sink.

Each one of them needs to get "winterized" at the end of the season. But if it's not done properly (and sometimes even when it is done properly) you end up with cracked and leaking pipes, fittings, or faucets. Or sometimes all three!

We only had the water turned on Wednesday morning. And there's a problem that I haven't figured out yet that's causing the pump to randomly turn itself off, so I've wasted a lot of time just with that. In the meantime when the water was working, we went around and checked each washroom building individually for leaks.

Two of them weren't too bad, and in fact we've got them operational now. Ruth used the leaf blower in them to get rid of leaves and crap and then our hired hand used our new pressure washer in them. Just a finishing touches cleanup this morning and they'll be ready to use.

But three of them needed work. One of them, a lot of work!

In fact, I think this one washroom was totally overlooked. I've fixed six different easily identifiable problems, and now I'm working on the ones I couldn't see.

Yes, there were broken pipes inside the walls!

This job entails being a jack of all trades.

So I had to remove the toilet and rip out one of the wall panels. There was six inches of water trapped on the floor between the walls! And two cracked pipes. It's amazing how frozen water can crack a copper pipe, isn't it?!

So, we'll just continue to poke away at it.

And I notice again that our water pump has shut off again overnight. Not helping the situation is that they've let water out of the lake and the level has dropped a couple of inches overnight. 

This system supplies lake water to the entire campground. Our house and the office and snack bar operate off a separate cistern.

The pump setup is kind of an eyesore in my mind. I'd like to get a shack built to house all of this stuff and tidy things up.

Not supposed to be a great weekend, weatherwise. Highs of around 17C (63F) and a 40% chance of showers all weekend.

Storm clouds yesterday.