Thursday, September 1, 2016

RV Trip Day 1


Day 1

On Friday, we set out on our adventure.  We had planned to leave around noon, but, with all of the usual last minute things that had to be done, we didn’t leave until about 3:30PM.  Our original plan was to drive to St. Louis and get there in time to have dinner, relax a bit and then get a good night sleep before hitting the road the next day.  As it worked out, we stopped outside of St. Louis to have some dinner because we were all hungry and we realized we were going to be arriving at the RV park after dark anyway.  We stopped in a Wal-Mart parking lot so we could grab a few groceries we needed and fix some dinner. 

We were so excited that our RV had an over-the-range microwave and we brought quite a few microwavable foods for quick meals on the road.  My son loves corn dogs, so we offered to fix those for him after he rejected all of the nearby restaurants that were within walking distance of the Wal-Mart parking lot.  We made sure the generator was turned on and I prepared to fix the corn dogs.  This is where we encountered a problem.  The microwave wouldn’t work.  We tried flipping breakers, plugging the microwave into different plugs, etc.  Nothing worked.  My son whined that he was hungry and wanted his corn dogs.  We called the RV owners and they had no idea what could be wrong either.  We finally decided it was probably a fuse in the microwave- not something we could fix ourselves.  It was getting rather late and we were all tired and hungry.  My husband, daughter, and I got food at a nearby restaurant to go.  My son ate some snack food we had and said he was full.  We continued on to our first campsite.

We arrived at the Lakeside 370 campground in St. Louis after dark.  We picked up our paperwork at the office and proceeded to our site.  My husband managed to park the RV and get the hookups done in the dark quite well.  I was impressed, but also rather exhausted.  We slid out the sides of the RV making it a much larger living space.  I pulled out the queen size sofa bed and made it up for our daughter and flipped open the other couch to make another full-size bed for our son.  We all collapsed into bed and went to sleep. 

Lakeside 370 was a pretty RV park right by a small lake in St. Louis.  I decided to take a shower using the park’s facilities the next morning.  Rather than being inside a restroom, it was a single unisex room with a door that locked.  The shower contained several bugs, one of the flying biting variety I soon found out.  I took a very quick shower while shooing away the biting fly.  I decided perhaps the RV shower would be a better bet in the future. 

My husband decided to take a quick shower in the RV.  As soon as he started running water down the drain, a horrible smell emerged from the drain.  It smelled like cat urine, only worse.  I googled bad smell from drain in RV and found that, apparently, this is a very common problem.  I found that it is a result of not keeping the drain trap filled with water.  We flushed water down the drain for about 20 minutes and the smell went away.  

We folded up the beds, slid in the slides, and set out for the next leg of our trip- a 6 hour drive to Salina, KS. 

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