Starting Off With Bleach

March 21, 2024 – Day 6

Lums Pond State Park Campground, Bear DE – Cherry Hill Park, College Park MD

Before we went to bed Paul started the process of sanitizing the fresh water tank. It’s a once or twice a year thing and it’s very important to do. You start off by putting 1/4 cup of bleach into the tank for every 16 gallons of capacity and fill it. Then we ran all the taps for a few minutes and waited 12 hours. The only reasonable time to do it is at night because you won’t have water for 12 hours.

(susan here: 9 p.m. is a very unreasonable time to do RV maintenance.)

Chores done we got back to our “rockstar lifestyle” and watched the final episode of The Queen’s Gambit. SPOILERS. We got to see Beth Harmon conquer her substance abuse problem and finally beat Borgov. It is interesting to note that the producers of the show used chess master Garry Kasparov and renown chess coach Bruce Pandolfini to contract her games. The final game was based on the match played between Ivanchuk vs Wolff at the 1993 Biel Interzonal. With that knowledge you can sleep soundly. I know, it’s exciting, isn’t it?

In the morning we started the time consuming part of removing the bleach. We emptied the 70 gallon tank down the sewer by running all the taps. That took about 30 minutes. Then Paul added about 5 gallons of fresh water, which he then drained into a bucket, brought it inside, and poured that down the toilet. Paul did that three times, about 4-5 buckfulls each time as we only had a 1-2 gallon bucket with us. Then Paul filled the 70 gallon tank with fresh. But we had to clear out all the lines. So we had to run the hot and cold taps in both sinks and the shower for 5 minutes each. We’d used nearly all of the 70 gallon tank but we wanted to get on the road. We decided we had more than enough water for an afternoon’s travel.

Notice the detour around Baltimore, going the south path would have been slightly faster but then we would have had scary bridges and/or tunnels and the winds were still pretty gusty.

It was going to be an easy drive of 107 miles to Cherry Hill Park in College Park Maryland just outside of DC. We’ve thought that before and wound up with a tough day’s travel. Apparently we haven’t learned that lesson yet. We’re in the mid-Atlantic and that means traffic. Lots of traffic. That adventure van in the left lane isn’t adventuring much today, are they?

Traffic also seems to bring accidents. We don’t see a lot of accidents on our trips but today we saw three! We can hardly wait to get out of the that traffic corridor from Jersey to Virginia. Don’t get us wrong, we love living in the North East, but travel in the mid-Atlantic area is always an adventure.

We can only guess that the truck and the car had an argument and both lost. The final accident we saw was on a highway we were crossing over. There was a semi-trailer in the ditch on the left side, lots of emergency equipment with flashing lights and big wreckers trying to clear it. As Susan said, “There are lots of big things with flashing lights.”

We passed a cool dam on the way to DC. That’s the Patuxent River behind that dam.

Eventually we made it to the RV Park without further incident, had a relatively easy leveling job, plugged in and and looked forward to settling in for the night. We went back and forth about what we should do for dinner. Order in? Go out? Or cook? We finally decided to pull the frozen Uno’s pizza out and “eat in.”

Weirdly, the convection oven turned off. Looking around nothing was on. It was then we noticed we had red lights on the power console. It turns out the 50 amp power pedestal was giving us bad power. Our surge protector had detected an “Open Neutral”. This is not a safe situation! We’re glad our EMS (electrical management system) worked flawlessly and protected both us and the coach. The park quickly sent out staff to fix the pedestal but the fault remains. The good news is that the 30 amp circuit was safe so we’re using that. We would only need the 50 amp line to run both air conditioners. Since the low temperature will be 30 tonight we’re running the heat instead!

Daily: 104

Total: 519

Driving Miles/Day: 173

Overall Miles/Day: 87