Great and Awful

Yesterday was my first camping experience with hookups! I had electricity and water and also a, ahem, hole to get rid of waste.

Thankfully the poop shoot tube wasn’t long enough to reach said hole, so I didn’t hook that up. Yes, this is foreshadowing.

Living like a Queen

I wanted to sit outside and enjoy a campfire, but the gnats were near biblical. They openly mocked my OFF and citronella candle, so I closed up the van and hopped inside for the night.

For the first time, I put the bed in the full king size configuration so that I could lay in bed and watch a movie. Yep, you heard me!

I cranked up the A/C, flipped off the light, and watched Oceans Eleven

After the movie I crashed and got a good night’s sleep.

Best work day so far

Working consistently has been a challenge, mostly due to lack of cell service (I’m using my phone as a hotspot to get my laptop online). I can’t blame it all on cell service though. Moving locations and traveling every day just doesn’t leave much margin for productivity.

If I was gonna do #vanlife for a stretch of time, I’d need to plan on being stationary for probably a week at a time. Of course, that’d also give me time to really dig into an area, too.

Anyhow, I enjoyed my percolated coffee (grounds included in my cup at no extra charge) and made myself some fried eggs and ghetto toast (ghetto = just heated both sides in a pan). Oh yeah, and got a few solid hours of work done.

Then comes the trauma

I packed up camp, unhooked water/electric, and went through my pre-flight checklist. I pulled out of my spot and missed my turn for the exit, so had to make another pass by my campsite. Good thing I did as I’d left my cast iron pot behind!

Packed up for real, I headed to the front of the campsite where there was a dump station. Heh heh. Dump station. I’m twelve.

Referencing the photo above, there’s a slinky-like tube on the right, a gray handle and a black handle and that black thing with a cap on it.

I pulled out the tube and connected it to the waste hole. Next step (so I thought) was to pull both the grey handle (for grey water) and black handle (for black water) to drain the tanks.

I heard some water flowing but not much. I checked the gauge inside the van and saw that the black water tank was on 0%, but the grey water was still at 75% full. 🤔

I pulled harder on the grey handle, thinking I missed something. No dice.

Finally, I tried to see if I could pull the cap off that other hole. Well that let loose EVERYTHING. It spilled (and kept spilling) all over the concrete and my feet.

There’s a hose at the dump station so I got that out and tried furiously to redirect “traffic” to the waste hole. It was so awful. So, so awful.

A literal $h!t show 😱

After doing my best with Lysol wipes to get my hands clean, I headed back to my campsite again and took an unplanned shower in the CAMPSITE SHOWER. I scrubbed my best, regrouped, and finally left camp.

Needless to say, I’m gonna watch some YouTube videos and/or read the manual before I attempt that again.

Onward

I’m well into the Oregon coastline today. It’s so interesting to me how the west coast changes along the way. Northern CA and Oregon beaches look nothing like southern CA.

I’m settled tonight and having deconstructed shiskabob and corn on the cob for dinner. I bought some jalapeño poppers to go with it, but I’m now seeing why they were on sale…

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading. ✌️