Our RV Adventures

I tried a couple of other things on my water pressure problem this morning, including switching out the hose from the faucet, all with no luck.

BTW I’m sure everyone’s seen those TV commercials for the ‘Pocket Hose’ and other brands of expandable/collapsible hoses. Does anyone know if you can get one that can be used for drinking water for the rig?

Jan and I headed out about 2:15pm for dinner and a movie, with a stop by the park to pick up a package (one of the one’s lost on the way to South Lake Tahoe finally showed up) and also sign up for the Honey Wagon. Besides low water pressure?, the only other problem with this Thousand Trails park is that it has no sewer hookups at all.

If Jan doesn’t do too many laundry loads, we can normally go a week on the grey tank, and two weeks on the black tank. So after picking my mail at the office, I stopped off at the County Store to sign up for a Thursday Honey Wagon run.

And it was $25 !!!  WTH!

I think it was about $5 last year. And the last two places where we’ve needed a honey wagon, it didn’t cost anything.

The movie we were going to see was the latest in the Star Trek series, “Star Trek Into Darkness”. Into Darkness is the second movie from J.J. Abrams of TV’s Fringe and Person of Interest fame. His 2009 “Star Trek” rebooted the story with all new actors playing all your favorite characters, and not only new actors, but a new timeframe

Events in the 2009 movie changed the timeline of many the events from the TV series and earlier movies. Spock’s accidental creation of a black hole threw him back in time and changed a lot of things we’re familiar with from the TV series.

Jan and I both really enjoyed this latest movie. I mean, it even had Tribbles.

By the time the movie was over, it was after 5:30 so we headed over to Black Bear Diner for dinner. We’ve eaten at a number of Black Bear’s over the years, including the first two in Weed, CA, and Mt. Shasta, CA. and it’s always really good. And it was no different this time. We finished up by sharing a Blueberry Cobbler Pie with Ice Cream. A great finish. Then after a quick stop at a Rite-Aid and a longer one at Wal-Mart, we finally got home a little after 8pm.

Tomorrow it’s probably more water stuff, with my pressure problems and getting back on my drinking faucet / water filter replacement.

Since we’ve got a lot of new readers since we visited here two years ago, I thought I’d repost our visit to Crater Lake.

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Crater Lake . . .

Originally posted on June 14, 2011

Jan having gotten up earlier as usual, this morning started at 8:30 for me, since we were leaving at 9 for our daytrip down to Crater Lake National Park.

But our first stop was at the park entrance at Big Jim’s Coffee Wagon, a coffee and pastry kiosk that’s open everyday from 6:30 to 10:30 am, and gets a lot of business from outside the RV park, as well as park residents. Jan had a Hazelnut Hot Chocolate and a breakfast sandwich, and I had a Snickerdoodle Latte and a bagel w/cream cheese. Both very, very good. We’ll go back.

Then we were on the road heading about 100 miles south to Lobert Junction where we would pick up SR 62.

Along the way, we saw Mt. Scott which is right next to Crater Lake, and blocks it from our view.

Right before we turned onto SR 62 we stopped for gas and a pitstop at the Crater Lake Junction Truck Stop, and then it was back on the road for the 35 mile trip up into the park.

We started out about 4000 feet, and by 4500 feet we were seeing snow.

And more snow at 5000 feet

And even more at 6000 feet.

Then we see this.  Oh, Boy!

But finally at about 7200 feet we pulled into Rim Village, and seeing a lot of people on top of a hill taking pictures, we decided to join them.

And this is what we saw! Be sure and click on this panoramic photo to see it full size. Be sure and use the slider bar at the bottom to see it all.

If ever a view was breathtaking.

Crater Lake is 6 miles across and 1949 feet deep, and from where we were standing on the rim, it’s 900 feet to the water.

This ‘lump’ is Wizard Island, formed from lava eruptions after the volcano Mount Mazama exploded in 5700 B.C., and then collapsed into the crater we have today.

Here’s an Internet photo showing it from a better angle.

And this Internet aerial view gives a better perspective of the entire crater.

The water in the crater, formed from snow melt over thousands of years, is some of the purest in the world, and really acts like a mirror.

Since it still goes down into the low 20’s here at night, you can see a sheen of ice around the edges of the lake.

And here’s my Sweetie, showing up the view.

While we were at Rim Village we checked out the gift shop and café. The first thing we notice were these ‘snow tunnel’ entrances leading out to the street.

And it’s really a long hallway leading into the building. It turns out that these are done this way so you can get into the building when there is 30 to 40 feet of snow covering up everything. Crater Lake gets a average of 44 feet (FEET!) of snow a year, and this way the snow plows can clear the entrance right along the edge of the road, so you can get inside the building.

Even the outside restrooms are done the same way.

A little after 1pm we drove about half a mile along the rim to the Crater Lake Lodge to have lunch.

Originally built somewhat shoddily in 1915, it had deteriorated to such an extent that in 1989 it was condemned, torn down, and rebuilt from scratch, with only the Great Hall being saved. And they did a beautiful job.

Jan and I had great Reuben Sandwiches in the dining room,

and then went outside to take in another great view of the lake from the lodge porch.

We even had a Steller’s Jay taking in the view with us.

All during the day, we kept bumping into this group of motorcyclists, who asked me to take their picture with their camera. So the last time I saw them I took a picture with mine.

If it had been a little later in the year, we could have taken the 31 mile loop drive around the crater. And we could have also come in the north entrance and saved ourselves about 100 miles. But the loop is still snowed in.

It takes 10 men working for 4 months starting in April to clear the loop. They can do about 1/4 mile a day to clear 30 feet of snow from a roadway 30 feet wide. That means they’re moving over 1 million cubic feet of snow a day. That’s over 25 million pounds. A DAY!

After getting our National Park Passport stamped, we headed back toward home, after having a great day.And then to top it off, after coming through the tiny town of Fort Klamath on SR62, we had probably our last view of Mt. Shasta, about 90 miles away. What a sight!

We got home about 6 pm, after a 9 hour trip of about 275 miles. A long, but really nice day.

Tomorrow, who knows?

But I know I’m sleeping later.

I had planned to work my water filter / drinking fountain replacement project today, but another project came to the forefront.

When I was getting us ready for our trip from Likely, CA to Bend,OR last Friday, I noticed a problem. After I had disconnected the shore water and turned on the water pump. I noticed the pump was pulsing on and off, and water was running back out of the shore water inlet connector. Turning off the pump stopped the water running out, so I put it on my mental list to look at later.

Getting into Bend and getting set up, I turned on the water pump again before I hooked up the shore water, and this time the pump did not run and no water ran out. So I finished setting up with no other problems.

But later that night when I took my shower, the water pressure was really sucky. So the next morning I took a look at the problem. Although the pressure coming out of the faucet didn’t seem too bad, it did seem better at the neighboring sites.

I then called the park ranger and ask him to send someone out to take a look at the problem. A maintenance guy showed up a little while later and found that the underground valve wasn’t turned on all the way. So I was hoping that this would fix the problem. But my late night shower told me different. So I was thinking I had a coach problem, but I would have to wait until today to call American Coach.

Calling them this morning, the support guy confirmed what I had wondered about, the check valve on the water input. If it’s not working right, it can let water leak back out, and restrict the water coming in. He told me the check valve is actually part of the inlet connector itself, and is easily replaced.

It only took me about 5 minutes to get the old valve out, but before I worried about replacing it I wanted to be sure it was the problem. So I headed down to the local hardware store and got a adapter that would let me hook up the water back into the coach. Here’s what I got.

The one on the left is the test adapter without a check valve, and the one on the right is the old one.

I quickly installed the new one and went back inside to check the shower flow, and bask in the glory of a job well-done.

Oops!

Although the shower flow might be marginally better, it’s still not as good as when I’m using the pump, and in fact, even when using shore water, turning on the pump makes it better.

So it’s back to square one. I had good water pressure in Likely, so what ever happened, happened in between here and there. Tomorrow it’s back on the phone to American Coach.

Also tomorrow, a movie and dinner is on the horizon. We’ll see.

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Thought for the Day:

“Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.” – Will Durant : Historian

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