Darren's RV Adventures

How much stuff do you need? This is our fourth season of owning a camper, but only our third season of using it.  We didn't get out at all in 2015 because we were house shopping and moving.  So this year we were hoping to go on a few more trips, which warranted rethinking what we have packed in the camper. The first year we went out I know I over packed the cabinets with food stuffs.  It's a bad habit I have so this year we made a conscious effort to go through everything we had and make sure it was there for a reason. Space isn't a serious issue for us.  We're not full timers, and it's only the two of us, so we have plenty of room. Our Rig Kitchen Kit. Pots and pans we managed to do well on.  I do as much cooking as I can on the grill (hoping to cook more over open fires this year) so our pots and pan needs are pretty low.  I have a cast iron skillet that does most of the breakfast cooking, A cake pan, a pie pan, a 2 quart sauce pan with a ...

I love a campfire.  Unfortunately every trip we've taken the closest I've gotten was when I managed to cook a few pork tenderloin cutlets over a fire in my cast iron skillet. Mostly it's been an issue of wood and weather.  Many places don't let you bring wood, due to the risk of certain insects and other tree health related things.  The other factor is rain.  When I have taken the step to get wood, either from a local market or the campground, I've had to spend more time in the camper due to rain.  Most of our trips tend to be in the early part of the season or later in the season, so Spring and Fall rains tend to be the norm. This year I spend a lot of time on You Tube watching videos on how to start fires even in bad conditions.  I was in the Boy Scouts as a kid, so I have had experience with these sorts of things, and I recalled a lot of those skills, but practical application of knowledge is the only way to really get good at it. We bought a fire ...

Adventures in water tank sanitation. We've had our rig a few years, but we have only boondocked one time.  This season I thought it might be a good idea to sanitize the fresh water tank, both to clean it and that we might go out to boondock a little more this year. Conventional wisdom seems to be 1/4 regular household bleach for every 15 gallons of capacity in your fresh tank. For those of you who have ever used bleach to purify water might look at that volume with a little suspicion.  I know I did.  But, something to keep in mind is that this is to clean the tank, so we're not really purifying the water. Dilute your bleach in a gallon or two of water, and take appropriate safety precautions.  Chlorine Bleach is dangerous if you get it in your eyes, and I highly recommend wearing gloves (latex, nitrile, etc.) to keep from getting bleach on your hands.  If you do get any on your skin, wash it off with water.  That slimy feeling when you get it on you i...

Black tank cleaning.  Attempt # 1.   The last few trips we’ve been on my black tank sensor has consistently read ½, even though I know the tank is ‘empty’.  This is pretty common in black tanks, solid waste will stick to the walls and give false readings.  I was hoping to resolve the issue this season, so I decided to try combining the sanitation of the fresh water tank with a good cleaning of the black tank. I don’t have a sprayer wand, but I thought if I put a fairly decent amount of hot water in the tank and then took the RV for a drive, it might help loosen up the solid waste and clean things a bit.  I also threw in some dishwasher detergent at the wife's suggestion to help things along.  The reason you would want to use dishwasher detergent for this sort of thing is that it’s designed to foam less.  You know this if you have ever thought that you could just put some dish soap in the dishwasher and run it.  When the foam started to se...

Campground Report - Ramblin Pines (Woodbine, MD) - May 5-7, 2017 The Maryland Sheep & Wool festival is an annual event here in Maryland.  The traffic to get to the Howard County Fairgrounds to attend is terrible unless you go early.  For the last two years we have made it the Shakedown Cruise for the season for our camper. Ramblin Pines is pretty close to the fairgrounds, and getting there from the campground brings you up on the lower traffic side, which makes getting in and out much easier. Ramblin Pines is a quiet wooded campground.  The staff have always been very fiendly, and the sites are pretty good.  Dirt, not cement, which means mud this time of year since it always seems to rain the weekend of Sheep & Wool.   The WiFi is rubbish at many of the sites.  The first night it decided to tank pretty much completely.  I’m pretty close to a repeater, so I’m not sure if it was the weather or the hardware.  After about 8:...