well, some days our travelling is pretty boring: lots of waiting behind road work (in good weather), sometimes seeing pretty scenery, often working hard to decipher ambiguous directions. Other days, like today, things start out badly and just stay that way.
Dumping our tanks this morning, Mark noticed a leak in the grey tank--that's the tank that holds the water we use in our sinks and shower (in contrast, the black tank holds the water from our toilet). This is not good, I soon found out. "Call Georgie Boy!" he said. "We need to drive out there today and get this fixed." Truly, our situation would change a lot without our sinks and our shower, especially our sinks. Mark was thinking about the pile of work he is trying to complete in the next four days, and that we are soooo close to Georgie Boy, the folks who made this RV (we were at the facility only ten days ago, and we're heading towards them on our way to Michigan this morning). "Okay" I said, and headed in to start making phone calls.
This is Fourth-of-July season, so every darn campground in Michigan is full of campers (it was really hard for me to find camping spots for us a few weeks in advance--we're moving every few days just to have someplace to stay), and RV servicers are extremely busy too, right now. Some will only fix rigs that they actually sold. So I wasn't optimistic. My first call was to Georgie Boy. I was thinking, "we'll drop our reservations in Holland and stay near Georgie Boy for a day instead, maybe in their parking lot." The Georgie Boy service guy didn't want to look at it, perhaps because they just moved (a few days ago) their service department to a facility 30 miles away. Instead, he gave me a number of different people to call, and said nothing more. The first number I called told me how bad the situation is: it could be a line leak or the tank itself could cracked. If it's the tank is cracked, we are talking two days of the RV being actually in the shop (hotels for us) and up to two weeks to order the part. Oh my god. Two weeks! I can't arrange for two weeks of new spots to stay at--nobody has that kind of availability now. I was nervous when Mark walked into the RV and looked at me, 10% inquisitively and 90% frustratedly. Gulp, "well...
...here's the bad news..." and, he was pissed. But later we decided to limp along till after the 4th of July. So till then, our grey tank will leak and hopefully not crack open, and we will hopefully do no additional damage to the RV. So it was hot hot hot today and despite running the generator and both roof a/cs, it was a sweaty drive. We made a wrong turn at the Michigan border, trying to politely use the truck route to get into the Michigan welcome center, and then, when we got to Holland, the instructions to the campground (published in our campground book) were just plain wrong. I tried calling the campground, who had told me they were open till 10pm, but I got an answering machine--they turn off the phones at 5:00 and I was calling at 5:02. I'd had been trying to get through (it was busy) since 4:50, incidentally. Mark was not amused. It was hot, he was tired, and we had the residue of the bad news about our tank. We had both complained something to the effect that "boy we'll be glad when this trip is done--things just keep breaking on this tin can," but truly both of us are glad to be on the trip (I say that now, after dinner and a rum-and-coke!).
So here we are, right by Lake Michigan, in this campground full of kids (yea!) and families. I'll stick a picture on--it's nothing special, but I'm thankful to be here.
Well, after dinner we went for a bike ride, down to the shore of Lake Michigan, just down the street from here. The lake is huge--it might as well be the sea, except there are no waves. Lots and lots of sand, though, apparently ground down by glaciers in an ice age. I'll have to steal a sample.
Tuesday, June 28
My stepdad Bill is flying to Vegas today, to try to win his way into the World Series of Poker. He's been playing poker since I was a kid--I remember his three-day-tournaments at home when my mom was away in San Francisco visiting her folks. I used to scrounge through the tobacco-covered cards (they threw away many decks an evening), putting together full decks I could use. It costs $10,000 to enter, but he usually wins his way in. Thousands will compete, and I heard the first place finisher will walk away with $20 million this year.
On the way to the post office this morning, we saw a candy store in town:
It advertised itself as being 100 years old, and, best of all, it was open at 9:45 (I had to go to the bathroom rather urgently). They wouldn't let us use their restroom, but I spied some small-time candy bars, so I agreed to Katie that we'd return later. We did, and bought all kinds of stuff to sample and send to Angie, who had mailed me the wonderful book Candy Freak. Here's a picture of the inside. I'd love to go back and just stare at all the neato candies there:
At the post office, we got our mail, Mark's magazines, and some 19th century clay marbles I won on ebay. They are heavy and cold and very played with. Katie will add to that too. Here they are:
After the post office, Katie and I went to the lake, and played in the water and the sand for a couple hours. It had rained early in the morning, and was still relatively breezy and cool. Around noon, the sun came out and immediately heated the sand up, and we left before we could burn our skin and especially our feet. Here are a couple pictures of Katie working on making "dog poops" out of mud:
Nearby was this pretty red wooden lighthouse:
On the way back to the RV we pass an old general store which always has kids hanging around it and claims to sell ice cream. We decide to see if Dad wants a break, and he does, so after lunch we ride our bikes over:
The ice cream melted so fast Katie couldn't keep up with it. They had 47 flavors--I picked triple caramel, which tasted like caramel ice cream with Rolos in it. Sounds a little more like double caramel, but I bet they had a third in there somewhere. My small was enormous and only $2. We bought some swim shoes and post cards inside. I wanted to get little party lights to hang from our awning, but they only had ones shaped like enormous ice cream cones, too kitchy for even me.
Katie and I went back downtown in the afternoon, walked around the neat little old historic business district (8th Street) and then got groceries and came home, having smoothies again for dinner, to bring down the heat a little. Luckily, berries are cheap here (they grow blueberries here and they're in season). After dinner, Katie suddenly wanted the training wheels taken off her bicycle. So Daddy complied and I videotaped their efforts to get her to ride solo (it didn't happen--she isn't quite ready yet and the road was rough so Mark didn't let her fall). No tears, but she calmly said she was scared and wanted them put back on. Here's Mark doing it for her. I was hoping to take a celebration picture instead, but maybe soon...
So it's 9:55pm and the last light is finally leaving the sky (we're on Eastern time, but we're on the border with Central, so it's really light here at night). It feels really nice camping among so many folks who are on vacation. Tomorrow I'll take some pictures of our place...
Wednesday, June 29
Today was sunny, so the crowds were high at the beach. When we first arrived, there was a huge ship coming through the straight, where it empties into Lake Michigan. The straight seems small till you see something like this zip by:
There were packs of high school kids (mostly girls) cruising the waterline; here's a rare moment when we had it to ourselves:
Katie and I played there until I got paranoid that I could feel my skin cells dying, and we came back home. I finally solved a problem I'd been having with a website I'm working on (I'll publish the address when it's done). The site doesn't look complicated but I'm using new techniques, so it's been complicated to create. Also Mark is almost ready to submit his engineering project--he thinks it'll be one more day of work for him. Unfortunately for him, tomorrow is a long drive day, so we'll leave early, in hopes of giving him some time to work tomorrow afternoon. And unfortunately for me, I've got insomnia tonight (it's now 1:41am on Thursday morning, truth be told. I gotta back off on the Diet Cokes I guess.
Finally, a shot (sort of) of our spot. It's raining this morning and we're trying to leave asap:
On to Petoskey...