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...