Greatly relieved to have driven Thomas 220 miles without any jerking, revving, or other symptoms of transmission distress, we arrived at the Waubonsie State Park campground. Since this park doesn't have water spigots at each campsite, we knew we'd have to fill our fresh water tank at one of the area spigots, so we pulled up to the first one we saw, screwed the female end of our white fresh water hose to the pump spigot, and while Scott held the male end in the tank access, I pulled up the pump handle, and we waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually water began flowing into our tank.
We assumed that one of us would need to stand there holding the hose until the tank was full, and how would we know when that was? Well, I guess like filling a water bottle, when it overflows? After we'd been standing around in the heat waiting for what seemed like a very long time, but was probably only seven or eight minutes, we pulled the hose out to check what was going on and found that the stream of water coming through the hose was only about the diameter of a Sharpie marker! It was going to take a L-O-N-G time to fill our 46-gallon fresh water tank at that rate! So, we wedged the hose in place to let it fill on its own and started dealing with other things.
In recent years I have developed an increased comfort level with approaching strangers and asking for information. While I wandered around the campground on my bike during our tedious fill, I saw a man pulling a much larger rig than ours (read: "who had a much larger fresh water tank than ours") setting up in site #17. I stopped and asked him if he'd found a better place to get water for his tank. Actually no. He looked weary and hot as he pointed to a different spigot he had used, saying, "The water pressure was very low, and it took me over 30 minutes to fill!" And how big was his tank? "58 gallons." Looking over at our rig, which happened to be parked on an incline, he said, "Yours is probably 30 or 40 gallons. I'd say it will take at least 20 minutes, maybe longer." I thanked him for the information and returned to our camper, wondering how on earth full our tank was.
About that time, Scott climbed in, checked, and announced that the freshwater gauge—all three gauges (fresh, grey, black) are marked E, 1/3, 2/3, and F—said "Empty." WOW! Patience, patience, patience.
Meanwhile, we considered site options. When you make a camping reservation online, you look at a map and select your site, and then that's where you'll be. But sometimes when you arrive, you realize that you'd really rather be somewhere else. In booking our site, knowing that it would have no "city" water and that we'd need to fill up several times, we had selected #24, which was right next to the bathroom, figuring access to water would be easiest there. Hmm… Mr. #17 had just spent 30 minutes filling up at the spigot by the bathroom…
Site #24 had no shade, and we do like us some shady trees. Also there'd probably be a lot of traffic, what with people walking or driving to and from the bathroom all the time. If the park had availability, maybe we could switch to another site. If so, we'd sure want to make that change before setting up at #24. I saw that the campground hosts were outside at their site, so I asked the lady if we could switch sites. "Yes, you can," she said, adding, "If you do, you'll want to use site #18 because it's a pull-through and it's level." I thanked her and gave Scott that info.
We looked at #18, which was obviously next to #17, where the man had finished setting up and was walking his two very well-behaved dogs, but we didn't much care for it. It was a level pull-through with plenty of shade and a nice woodsy view, but it was ALL gravel which seemed kind of discouraging, especially since we'd be here for six nights.
So, since we didn't want sunny #24 or gravelly #18, we surveyed other options. #21 was level—and level is a big deal when selecting a campsite. I vividly recalled the agony we went through in setting up on a hilly site in a private North Carolina campground last May. But #21 had no shade, so we opted for #20 which did have shade although it wasn't perfectly level.
That ended up being an understatement.
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