Old Man Winter...

My car at the first snow of the year.

I can't believe it's been nearly a month since I last wrote. We've been very busy around here, but I didn't think it had been that long. I will definitely do my best to be better at posting!

Lots has changed around here, but the biggest change would have to be the season. It's no longer fall here. Winter has come and brought freezing temperatures, snow and ice. We have had cold feet, frozen water, chilly bums, and ice cold beds. It's definitely been interesting adjusting, but it's all good too.

So, the first thing is we have had to winterize the trailer, but not in your typical way. Most RVs, you drain all of the lines and then replace the water with antifreeze for the winter. Because we are staying in ours, and would like to have some water, we can't do this. We have to find a way to keep our water from freezing while not using antifreeze.

What we did was take our water line, that's hooked up to the campground water, and we wrapped it in tinfoil. Yes, the entire 30' hose is wrapped in tinfoil. We then taped heat tape to the hose. If you don't know what heat tape is...it's not tape. It looks like a long electrical cord which has a sensor on it, and when the temperature gets close to freezing, the cord warms up. This keeps pipes (or in our case, hoses) from freezing. The reason we wrapped it in tinfoil first, is that tinfoil conducts heat far better than plastic, making sure we aren't only warming one side of the hose.

Our water compartment. It's inside the 'basement' door. The white hose is our water, and it's connected directly to the campground water. The black cord is the 'heat tape' and you can see the orange sensor on it. This is before we had everything attached. Yes...there is a plug-in in our water compartment.

Water hose wrapped in tinfoil with the heat tape attached with tape.

We then wrapped the whole thing with pipe insulation tubes. They look like pool noodles.

Once everything was wrapped in the pool noodles, or pipe insulation tubes, or whatever they are called, we had a nice warm home for our water hose. It worked great! The only problem was, where the campground water comes out of the ground, in the metal pipe, it kept freezing. Our hose didn't freeze, but that doesn't help when no water gets to the hose in the first place. We learned to keep our holding tank full of fresh water, just in case. Usually by the afternoon, everything had defrosted and we could use the campground water, but there were quite a few mornings without water.

Then..yes, there's so much more...the campground shut the water off. For the winter. For real. I guess their pipes are too close to the surface and they freeze quite regularly. The owners have taken to shutting the water off for the winter and blowing out the lines, saving them the cost of repairing burst water lines. They then haul water and use a pump to fill the RVs here twice a week. They come every Monday and Thursday. Our holding tank is large enough to provide us with plenty of water...as long as we don't shower. 

Luckily, a short walk away is a shower house. In fact there are two shower houses. One where the laundry is, and one by the fish pond.  The showers are free, and in some ways, better than showering in the RV. I don't have to worry about using all the hot water, or using all the water period. I can have it as hot and as long as I would like. The problem though, we have to walk to the shower house. I also learned that if you shower on the weekend, you may...or may not...have hot water. I must share this story. Haha.

The outside of the shower house by the fish pond. Left is women's, right is men's.

Inside the women's side of the shower house. There's two toilets, two sinks, two showers, and plug ins if you need to use a blow dryer.

The shower stall.

One fine Saturday morning, I wandered over to the shower house by the fish pond, images of hot water dancing through my head. Upon arriving, I undressed, started the shower, and hopped in. Less than 30 seconds later...the water was ice cold. I jumped out as fast as I could. Shivering, I contemplated this. It happened so fast, my hair was still dry. I could just towel off and head back to the RV. Obviously all the hot water had been used up before I got there. Just as I decided to come back later, the water turned steamy again. Strange. 

Deciding someone had perhaps flushed a toilet, or ran a tap, or something in the men's side, I got back in the shower. Got my hair wet, and FREEZING WATER. Crap! Hop out again. Now my hair is wet, I'm freezing, and nothing is clean yet. Covered in goosebumps, shivering, I contemplate again. I really want a shower. It's been at least 30 seconds since I jumped out...maybe I should go home. 30 seconds is a long time when you're wet, cold and standing next to a shower. Hot steam comes from the shower. Ok, lets try this again. Hop back in the shower, warm up, put shampoo in my hair, get it nicely lathered, and FREEZING WATER. This has to be some sick joke. Now my hair is full of soap. I can't just leave. I have to rinse my hair out. Do I do it in the freezing water? This water is ice cold. It's not like it just cooled off and is merely warm. This stuff is being pumped straight from a glacier somewhere, I swear!

The goosebumps on me look like small mountains. I'm seriously debating running back to the RV with the soap in my hair and rinsing it off there. I think it's been a full minute. Yes, that's what I'll do. The hot isn't coming back this time, I can tell. I look at my towel....and heat comes from the shower. Really? I sigh, and hop in the shower. 

My hair rinsed, the water goes ice cold again. I jump out. I'm getting a little mad now. I'm plotting all of the things I will say to the campground owners about their defective shower and my horrible experience. The shower goes hot. Ok, that time it was only for a second or two. That's not bad. I'll see if I can wash before it goes cold again. Yes. I managed to finish my shower in blessed heat. Moral of the story, don't shower on Saturday. So far. I haven't had a problem during the week. We'll see if that changes.

We also discovered that the slides are about 5º cooler than the rest of the trailer. You know...the place where our beds are, and our living room couch, and our dining room table. Yeah. They are cooler. Our feet get cold on the floor. We have since skirted the trailer, and that has greatly improved the warmth of the floor, but you can still feel the cold through the walls of the slides. It's only -15ºC here. We aren't freezing by any means. I have to admit though, I'm a little concerned what the slides will feel like at -40ºC though. 

The RV with it's tinfoil, bubble wrap skirting on (I think it's called Flex Foil Insulation). The large propane tank is a new addition as well. A company comes out and fills it for us, all 380lbs. We just have to call them when it hits 30%. It's way more convenient and much cheaper than the smaller 30lb bottles.

In the meantime, we are wearing slippers, and we discovered an amazing invention. A mattress heater. No more getting into an icy cold bed. No, no! We turn the warmer on about an hour before we go to bed, and we crawl into a heated bliss. Oh my. It's heaven. The dogs love it too. Gunner never used to sleep on the bed, but he's finding his way on our bed more and more. Manny sleeps on top of the blankets now, he usually sleeps under them. I think it's too hot under them with the heater on. 

Lap blankets are our friend now too. Don't get me wrong...we aren't cold. It's just...cool, sort of. Like a slight draft, almost. It's hard to explain. We could probably turn the heat up and be just fine, but that would mean our furnace would be running more and our propane would be disappearing faster. We don't want that, so we use slippers, blankets, a space heater, and mattress warmers. With those things, we are toasty warm. The space heater is also to keep the furnace from running as often. Power is free here...propane isn't. 

So far, so good on the winter RV front. I will keep things updated more often, as we also have internet. Did I mention that? We have satellite internet now, and with being fairly careful, we can avoid going over our allotted 30 gigs a month. It may seem like a lot, but not if you consider that one HD movie from iTunes uses 4.5gigs. Or...a 5 minute youtube video can use 100mb. Thats roughly 1/10 of a gig. So 10 videos that are only 5 min long, and I've used a gig in less than an hour. We are downloading seasons of tv shows and movies once a week while I clean the apartment, and we are avoiding using the internet for things like, netflix, youtube, and facetime. We are, however, playing online games, specifically, Guild Wars 2. Before you panic...an hour of online gaming..on a pc...uses about 24 mb. I would have to play for 4 hours to use up what one 5 min video on youtube is using. BUT, it would be totally different if I was using a PS3 or an Xbox 360 to game online. The graphics are much higher, and can use as much as 100-200mb an hour.

I digress, all is well here. Until next time, take care =)