Yuccch! The Zen of Participation

I still have hard time thinking of RV travel as camping. Sure, you stay at campgrounds, and especially the smaller units are often called campers, but if you travel in a full featured RV, it’s called a trailer or a motorhome. In either case, when you have a full featured RV, then you ain’t camping; you’re just looking for a place to hook up to all the comforts of home. Full featured means a kitchen that contains a sink, a stove, a microwave, and a refrigerator with a freezer. A bathroom with a toilet and a sink. A shower. And a living room area with a TV. For all these things to work including the cabin lights, the heat and air conditioning obviously electricity is needed so we need the campground to have a plug available so we can use their electricity. But we also have a tank to store clean water for washing yourself, your dishes and the toilet. Of course a water heater is part of the plumbing as well.  When we arrive at a new campground in our mobile home it makes things a lot easier if they have connections to their water so we can refill our water tank as we draw water. Now, perhaps, the obvious question has become apparent. What happens to the water after it is used?

That is where yuck comes in. Many campsites have a sewer connection right at the site where you hook up.  This pretty convenient. But other campgrounds only have a dump station for everyone to use. At some time during a stay you have to empty out those tanks of used water. There is one tank to catch all the water that goes down the drain. The other catches the water that is flushed. The drainage water is called gray water and the flushed water is called black water. But it actually looks brown.

Yuchhh!

At our first campground on the trip, there was no sewer connection or a dump station. But the meters said our black water tank wasn’t full and the next campground had a dump station. Ideally you want a sewer hook up at your site, but a dump station just means you gotta stop as you’re leaving and dump it all out. When I went to the dump station, and opened the outflow on my RV the outflow started dumping what was in the black water tank.  Did I say yuccch! yet?  Apparently, I had not closed the shut off valve from the black tank all the way. There was a lot of very brown water and some solid brown clumps as well all around my RV in the camp parking lot. Fortunately, they always have a hose available at the dump site and I immediately began hosing it towards the sewer pipe where my dump hose was supposed to go.  The campground manager was really nice about it, and we got it pretty well cleaned up. There was a huge downpour coming that night, so by the morning all was clear.

Taking your motel room with you when you travel means you take along all the maintenance and maintenance horror stories that in a motel you only experience as something that happens to you. In an RV you are a full participant. Right now we are in New Orleans and walking around I recognized that in order to cross streets at cross walks, just don’t wait for traffic to stop for you. Instead you participate by telling the car drivers that you want to cross. It’s always nonverbal communication, and nobody gets cross with the other party of a street crossing transaction. The only time I saw a driver getting upset was with a woman who crossed as if it was her right. She was not participating. We are enjoying our trip immensely because whether its poop in the parking lot or crossing a street full of people and traffic, we are participating in all of it.