The day we met Sherman

I almost forgot! It was ten years ago today that we met Sherman.

On Sunday, August 19, 2007 we drove from Ottawa and crossed the United States border down to a little town near Albany, New York. About a five hour drive each way.

About two and a half weeks prior to that, we had made the rash decision to sell our house, quit our jobs, and buy a motorhome to travel North America for a couple of years!

Our route in Mexico this winter

We're sure excited about our return to Mexico this coming winter. I know, it's still over 4 months away and we've got a lot of stuff to show you in the meantime, including 19 days in Barbados and a six week RV trip through the U.S. to the Mexican border.

But what can I say? We're most excited about our return to Mexico!

A few decent wildlife photos around the park...

It was our friend Doug's last day here yesterday, and he wanted to take us out for lunch. There's a nice little cafe in the town of Cabri called "House of Heart" with good old fashioned home cooking. We've been there before, and it's a great little spot.

Fortunately, the park is pretty quiet during the week, so we were able to take an hour and a half and go in to town.

Back in business

When the pump when down yesterday morning, it was pouring rain. This is actually a good thing (not the timing, but the rain!) because the park has been under a fire ban for over a month now, and the steady morning rain was enough for the ban to be removed.

So the campers will now be happy that they can have campfires again!

Well, I was all set to do a blog post...

When someone called and said the water pump is down. I ran out (in the pouring rain) to see if it was something simple... but it's not.

What we chose for a new solar charge controller...

I showed you in our last post that our friend Doug had brought a new charge controller up from the states for Sherman's solar charging system. I wanted to expand on that a little bit and explain why I wanted a new one and why it is different from the one we had before.

Charge controllers are rated by the number of amps they can process to the batteries. In our case, we have 240 watts of solar panels that produce about 15.0 amps under ideal conditions.

Lots of news!

On Tuesday, our friend Wendy arrived from Moose Jaw to visit for a couple of days. She and her husband were full time RVers for 22 years until he passed away 10 years ago. Now, she has a class B van that she takes on trips, but lives in an apartment in Moose Jaw.

She just brought her minivan with her to visit us though, and she's staying in our spare bedroom.

And, another visitor showed up yesterday!

A pretty successful weekend

Well, our last busy weekend of the season is over. Sure, there will be a few people around the park for the next couple of weekends, but we won't be sold out again this year like we were last weekend!

Plus, harvest is starting a little early this year because of the dry June and July. So most of our local clientele are out working the fields for the next month or so.

You just have to give your head a shake

Here in the province of Saskatchewan, they have a great recycling program where almost all empty drink containers have a deposit on them. Juice boxes, all bottles and cans... virtually any kind of drink container. This way, none of it is tossed out the window of a car, and what is tossed out the window is soon picked up by someone who collects them for the deposit money.

Of course we collect a lot of those containers here at the park, and many people who camp here "donate" their recycling for the park to be able to collect the deposit.

Busy weekend coming up

Well, you may not hear from us much this weekend. The park is sold out, as it is every August long weekend up here in Canada. It's actually been sold out for almost three weeks now, and I'm still fielding about ten phone calls a day from people looking for a campsite.

We had about a half an inch of rain on Tuesday, but it wasn't enough to remove our fire ban which is instituted by the RM (Rural Municipality) that governs the area.

Google Assistant

In some ways, I am fairly familiar with computers and high tech stuff. In other ways, we're definitely a little behind the times.

For example, we didn't own a "smart" phone until our son donated his old iPhone 4s to us just over two years ago. And of course the iPhone 4s was ahead of it's time when it came out in 2011... but by mid 2015, the time we started using it, technology had already surpassed it.

July Expenses

Well here we are on the last day of July! Tomorrow, we'll be able to say "next month we're outta here!"...lol.

And we're not planning on spending any money today, so we might as well give you our July expense report.

It was a good July for us! We only spend $675 in total, and that included buying a brand new laptop! Wow!

RV'ing in Newfoundland!

Canada's newest province is Newfoundland and Labrador. Often, the province is simply called Newfoundland although Labrador is part of the mainland and Newfoundland itself is an island. In fact, 92% of the provinces population live on the island of Newfoundland while 8% live in Labrador.

The entire area has a population of 528,000 people.

Parched

Last Sunday, the park was packed. It was a beautiful hot sunny day, with hardly any wind... perfect weather for getting the boat out on the lake... and that's exactly what people did. It was a zoo... hardly any parking spots and you almost couldn't make your way through the number of trucks and boat trailers that were parked out front.

Even at 9:00pm Sunday night when the concession usually closes, there was still a lineup of people trying to buy ice cream!

But by Monday, things had quieted right down. And yesterday was dead, despite the beautiful weather!

RV Caravan trip to Mexico

Most of our regular readers will remember when we led an RV caravan group in Mexico for the month of February in 2016. That was a kind of a test run for us to be able to decide if we wanted to lead a longer caravan.

And, we did end up making a commitment to lead one this coming winter. I was talking with the organizer yesterday, and it turns out that you can still come with us if you like!