Warranty problems

It's no good buying a product with a warranty if it breaks and then the manufacturer makes it too difficult to make a claim.

Such is the case with my camera bag. The bag is made by a subsidiary (Ape Case) of a company called Norazza...a company with it's world headquarters and distribution center located in Buffalo, New York.

A little dirt never hurt anyone...

The lake level has begun to rise...but the long term forecast doesn't look good. It's unlikely that people will be able to use our boat launch this year, and we probably won't have a swimming area either.

But that doesn't stop kids from having fun! Our grandkids proved yesterday that mud can be as much fun as water!

Nice to have a chef in the house!

Rainy start to the day yesterday as it had rained overnight, and then it poured for an hour or so in the morning before drizzling for a few hours after that. The rain guage says we had about 3/4 of an inch.

So that translated into a really quiet day here at the park, and maybe only four or five of our seasonal campers had showed up for the weekend knowing that rain was in the forecast. Today is supposed to be sunny, but rain is forecast again for tomorrow.

Camping the road less travelled...

An appropriate title for an article written about us by RV West Magazine. You can find it at the following link...

http://www.rvwest.com/article/journeys/camping_the_road_less_travelled

It's kind of fun reading about our story from another perspective. Looking back on the fact that we've been living a "different" lifestyle compared to most people our age for the last nine years or so, we wouldn't give it up for anything.

Getting Sherman ready for another motorhome adventure!

We're slowly getting all of the little things done to Sherman to get him ready for our motorhome exchange. Tana and Graham have arrived in Canada, but they've gone to Vancouver first and they're taking an Alaska cruise prior to coming here to pick up the motorhome on June 8th.

We got the new tires last week, and I made a new cutting board to fit the sink properly.

Grandkids for two weeks!

That's a bit of a long drive doing all the way to Regina and back in one day. From here to the airport was 309 kms (192 miles) one way.

I filled up with gas in Swift Current, and then filled up again at the same station on the way back. Figured out that the little blue car got 38 mpg keeping the cruise control right at 100 km/h (62 mph).

Off to the airport!

I love going to the airport. One way or the other, it means that somebody is traveling! Either we're going on another trip, or in this case...we're picking somebody up!

Our daughter Lindsey and grandchildren Cameron (5) and Sadie (2 1/2) arrive today for a two week visit. So I'm heading to Regina airport fairly early this morning, and it's a three hour drive each way.

Boondocking across Canada

One of our facebook fans asked about the possibilities of boondocking in Canada. Well, we've been all the way from coast to coast in our motorhome, and have never had a problem finding somewhere free to overnight.

Although Canada doesn't have the same type of BLM (Bureau of Land Management) opportunities that the U.S. does, Canada really does have much more open land available for similar use than the U.S.. The problem is that so much of it is further north.

C'mon up to Canada!

I was reading on a facebook RV forum the other day, and somebody was asking questions about driving from the U.S. to Alaska. Of course to do that, you have to cross the Canadian border. You should have seen some of the answers and comments. Yikes! These people had obviously never been out of their own country. And it occurred to me that a lot more Canadians cross into the U.S. than the other way around.

More than 75 % of the total Canadian population lives within 100 miles of the U.S. border.

Special visitors coming this week!

Late start to the blog post this morning. Woke up, and noticed right away that the water wasn't running, so had to go out and fix that up first! Not an easy fix, and I had to recruit one of the young fellas around here to go out into the muddy water and straighten out the intake pipe that had been blown around by the storm last night.

Pretty sure we've got it anchored securely enough now!

I always wanted one of these!

Sherman got some new tires the other day, and I'm a bit of a stickler for tire pressure, so when we're traveling with the motorhome I check the tire pressure at least once a week. When we first set out with the motorhome eight and a half years ago, I had bought a good quality foot pump at a decent price.

And occasionally, I used it on the motorhome tires.

I hate the sight of blood. Especially my own!

At our campground, the water comes directly from the lake to supply the individual campsites and the washroom buildings. Normally, we've got it all hooked up and running by now. But this year the water level is so low, and last week when it rained, it turned the shoreline to thick mud. So we had to wait for it to dry up again before we could get close enough to the water to put the intake in.

And, we were waiting for a rebuilt pump to be ready. Well, yesterday was the day.

New boots for Sherman

The last time Sherman had four new rear tires installed was in October, 2010...so about five and a half years ago. Those four rear Goodyear tires have never come off since. Never had a flat, or any problems with them. Except now, they had 56,000 kms (35,000 miles) on them.

If it were just me driving it, I probably would have waited until next year to replace them. But, we want the other party of our motorhome exchange agreement to have worry free motoring, so we are making sure that Sherman is in tip top shape for them!

An interesting visitor to the park!

Around noon yesterday, a couple of ladies came into the park and explained that they were waiting for someone who was canoeing from upriver. They thought that maybe he was only an hour or two away.

And, the canoeist had a GPS tracking unit with him, so we got them on line and figured out where he was on the river. It didn't look like he was too far away.

Does anybody make their own salad dressing??

Perfect weather we're having here at the park. High of 20C (68F) yesterday and no wind. This makes leaf blowing, raking, and cleanup a lot easier. In fact, we were enjoying being outside so much that we worked until just after 6:30pm!

And, we had our first two seasonal trailers show up. A little early, but they had both called in advance and asked. One of them was a huge fifth wheel, so they wanted to get in ahead of everyone else so that they had some maneuvering room, and it was a good thing they did.

That's a lot of RVs!

I see in the news that the North American RV industry is on track to produce a record 400,000 RVs this year. Wow...that's a lot of RV's!

I would guess that this high demand is a direct result of the baby boom generation retiring. That demographic group of people (now aged 52 to 70) making it's way through time creates great opportunity for economic impact to the sector that lies in it's path. But, the industry itself also says that younger families are also affecting sales, as is the RV rental industry.

And now I have two!

Clean up continues here at the park. We're definitely ahead of where we were last year at this time, although the rain on Monday and Tuesday was a small set back. Still, we'll be ready for campers next weekend.

Only thing that hasn't come together yet is our water. Even with the rain, the lake level has only risen about a half a foot in the last two weeks, and even though it will continue to rise it won't likely come to a decent level for another month yet.

Good news for international travelers!

It was announced the other day that Google Translate would be available offline for the iPhone platform starting immediately. For those of us who travel to countries where they don't speak English, this is fantastic news!

In fact, I already went to the "app store" and downloaded the necessary files.

I was wrong!

So, we had two solid days of rain on Monday and Tuesday. In fact, our rain gauge outside says that we got two and a half inches, so that was a much needed soaking for our grass.

The only problem with that much rain is that the roads around here turn to mud. They're like concrete when they're dry, but they're like mush when they're wet!

How to find great boondocking campsites

We were asked several times over the winter how we find great boondocking campsites. And it's not a short explanation, so we put off answering the question until we had time to write a complete blog post about it.

Boondocking. To us, the term means camping away from it all without any services. As in "out in the boondocks". It does not mean parking overnight at Walmart. That is most certainly not boondocking. It's simply parking overnight at Walmart.

Booked!

A steady rain fell throughout the day yesterday. Great for our grass, and great for the local farmers, many of whom had just finished seeding. And we had just had a fire ban instituted, so there's no reason that won't be removed. Raining again today, but it's supposed to clear up by Wednesday morning.

We don't take many days off while we're here at the park. There's always something that needs doing. But when it rains like that, it's an indoor kind of a day!

Planning for next winter!

We know that we are going to be in southern Spain completing our motorhome exchange deal in January and February of 2017. And that we plan to visit Morocco and Algeria in March and April of 2017.

And, we plan to be in Ottawa with our families for much of October and also at Christmas of this year.

But we still have approximately two months of travel to fill up between October 25 or so and Christmas.

A moose on the loose!

I spent yesterday morning hooking up the line to get some water to the park. It's about 200 yards worth of 2" tubing, so I had to splice a few of them together to get that distance. Got that much done, and today I'll hopefully get it up and running. We want to get some water on the grass (and to the bathrooms), although they are actually calling for a half an inch of rain tomorrow, so hopefully they're right.

We had a few visitors yesterday! Wendy and Phil are long time RV'ers and blog readers who live in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan and they came to visit for the weekend. They didn't bring their RV though, so they're couchsurfing with us.

Spring cleanup is a little easier this year...

It's been a few days since we've given you an update on our activities here at the park. Canada's May long weekend is the typical time of year for most campgrounds to open, and so we're in full "clean up" mode getting the park ready for it's May 20th opening.

And, quite a few things have made our job a little easier so far this year compared to last year!

A neat product, but...

As wireless technology continues to improve, manufacturers are coming out with some innovative products. Over the last couple of years, one of the neat things is wireless tire pressure monitoring systems.

I'm a stickler for checking my tire pressure, both on the motorhome and the car. It's important to have the proper tire pressure, and I learned from my years in the automotive business that many people don't check their tire pressure often enough. With the proper pressure, your tires last longer, you get better gas mileage and ride quality, and it's safer.

April Expenses

April was a pretty expensive month for us, but mostly because of the amount of fuel we used getting from Southern California up to Canada.

We spent a total of $2,523 CAD ($1,892 USD) for the month.

How much do we spend on a winter away?

This post was going to be our April expense report. But I figured it would be much more useful to detail how much we spent, and on what...during our entire 7 months away. (I'll do a separate post about April later today.)

Our regular readers know what we did all winter, but for the benefit of anybody new here, let me refresh your memories with the highlights...

These will be great for travel in the motorhome...

Well, the muscles got their second work out of the season yesterday as we cleaned up most of the fallen branches from the day use area. It does seem to be going a little faster than last year though because there aren't as many leaves around.

Although we get a lot of leg and aerobic exercise from the hiking we do over the winter, our upper body muscles don't get much exercise at all over the winter. Before RV'ing came into our lives we both used to do a lot of gym workouts, and even had a nice home gym at our house. Ruth even worked at a gym for quite a while.

And then there were two...

Ruth mostly worked on the house yesterday. The rain gutters needed cleaning, so she actually got up on the roof and did that. There's not much of a slope, so not really dangerous...you just have to be careful. And she trimmed back some branches while up there.

And, she cleaned all of the windows. They tend to only get done once a year, so they needed it!

Another neat gadget

There is nobody around who hasn't at some point needed to have their car battery boosted. Not that long ago, it used to be that you needed a good quality set of booster cables. Then, they came out with those portable booster battery packs, but they were fairly big and heavy.

Now, with the new lithium battery technology, a very small battery packs a powerful punch.

Back at the park!

So, we're back at Cabri Regional Park. This will be our third summer here as park managers. The first year that we arrived there were no leaves on the trees. Last year, things were a little greener. But this year, spring has arrived early.

In fact, it looks like we're heading straight in to summer and might be bypassing spring completely!