Friday, May 29, 2009 - Still at Lincoln RV Park
The weather has been very pleasant since I arrived in town and the cool evenings are a nice change. In Helena, it has been in the 70s and even 80s, but up at the cabin it has been in the high 60s, which is perfect for this time of the year. The trees at the RV Park have bloomed and now all turned green with their leaves, but my trees at the cabin haven’t even started to bud. As soon as the longer days warm up, all of it will burst into color.
It is now 10 O’clock and as soon as I have a bite to eat, Zack and I are headed up to get the water restored to the cabin.
Home again, or at least back at the motor home. We got to Lincoln Road about 5 minutes before the departure of the “follow me” truck and drove to the cabin. There is less snow on the Divide by about half from the first trip up. I still have some snow around the cabin, but just in those areas that had large wind drifts. Mostly it is just really muddy as the snow above melts and comes down the mountain into my front yard.
I fired up the generator to fully charge the batteries while I worked on restoring the water system. Using the backup water pump, I switched the necessary pipes from the old to the new and installed it. I primed the pump, crossed my fingers, flipped the switch, and within a minute the water filled the filters and started to fill the accumulator and water heater. I checked all of the plumbing for possible leaks and found none, and I now have water.
My next task was to relight all of the pilot lights, so I started with the refrigerator, which lit without a problem. I then lit the stove pilot lights and moved to the water heater. If you’ve never had to light a water heater pilot light, you wouldn’t understand, but it isn’t the easiest to light. In order to see what you are doing, you either have to get down on your knees, or lay down on the floor. You then must turn a knob to “pilot” and push it down and hold it to make the gas flow. Now you must light the pilot, without being able to see what you are doing, unless you have a flashlight trained on the area. Once the pilot light has a flame, you must continue to hold the button down until the thermal coupler has heated sufficiently to keep the gas flowing. This can be up to a couple of minutes, and in my case, never. Each time I let the button up, the pilot light went out. The stick lighter I was using was almost out of fuel, so I had to rely on the spark from it to continuously ignite the gas.
After fooling around with it for almost an hour (weighting the knob down to keep the gas flowing while I did other things) I still couldn’t get it to stay lit. I suspected the thermal coupler was bad, so got the owners manual out and read the trouble shooting section to confirm it. I will have to buy and replace the coupler to further determine if that is all the problem is. The thought of not having any warm/hot water to clean and shower with, doesn’t appeal to me at the moment.
I put the outdoor furniture back on the deck, along with my weather station, filled all the bird feeders, which got immediate attention from the patiently waiting nuthatch, and vacuumed the sunroom and living room. I cleaned the bathroom and kitchen counters, as the mice droppings were rather disgusting. I then moved all of the bottled and canned items that I had stored in the shower, not knowing for sure if they might freeze, back to their prospective cabinets. The high/low thermometer I had left in the shower shows that the lowest temperature in the cabin was 10 degrees, which isn’t as bad as I thought it might be.
I had accidently left a can of root beer in the refrigerator and it had froze and released it’s content, so that had to be cleaned up. Other than that, the cabin survived the winter well and I now know what to do, and not do, the next time I have to winterize it. I have yet to check all of the vehicles in the garage, but a quick visual check shows all seems to have survived. I’ll charge the batteries as necessary and start the Argo, truck, bulldozer, and the trail and lawn mowers to make sure all is well. After making sure all is in working order, I shall pronounce the cabin habitable, and then I need to take the dozer down the road and repair the damage that the water run off has created. After driving in and out three times now, I think I will reroute parts of the road to avoid having the same problem areas each spring. There are four spots that I, and others, have driven around to avoid, so I’ll just doze a new road in those locations.
Aside from playing with Zack a few times, and giving Zoey the attention she craved, that was the extent of the day. Zack and I drove back to Marysville at five O’clock, hoping to meet the follow me truck at the prescribed quarter past the hour. On the way in, I specifically asked the driver if they were working until 7:00 PM, as they had been on the previous days, and he said they were. I also asked if they were working on the weekend, which he said no, so there are no restrictions on Saturday and Sunday.
We got down the mountain to the road at 5:20 PM, missing the quarter after truck, but all of the heavy equipment was parked, so I drove on to Mary and Guy’s for a short visit while waiting for the next follow me truck at 6:15. Mary and Guy said that because it was Friday, they were sure that the work had stopped and I could probably drive straight through. I left their place at 6:10 and saw the follow me truck taking down all of the signs and lights. I stopped to talk to them and indeed they were done for the weekend. They have almost half of the road paved on both sides now, so I am impressed with their speed. This is the same construction company, but a totally different crew that is laying the pavement, so that may make some difference.
Zack and I drove straight into town and stopped at Home Depot to buy a replacement thermal coupler ($9.96) and then back to the RV Park, where I played with him before giving him his dinner. I showered and then started fixing my dinner when a knock at the door stopped me. Lee came over to see if I wanted to see his wife’s final taxidermy work, which I did, so turned off the stove and went two spaces down to view her work.
She had completed seven or eight mounts of almost everything you can imagine. There were deer, elk, and bear heads, a whole wild boar, and a complete javelina, sometimes referred to as Peccary, three trout, and an Alaskan wolf pelt. She had done a nice job on all of them and I was impressed with how much she was able to accomplish in the four weeks of the class.
I went back to my dinner and some research on the computer before going to bed.