States & Provinces visited on this segment: Ontario
Dates: Sunday, July 15 to Tuesday, July 17
Miles driven: 510 (5010 total to date)
Summary: When we woke up on the 15th the gloomy damp weather that had been with us since we entered Michigan was gone and we were back to mostly blue skies. I was glad to leave the RV park in Thessalon that we stayed at as the campground had lots of issues. See “other notes” below for the issues with this RV park and some of the common issues we have had with campgrounds we have stayed at. Elizabeth says she wants to build and run a campground when she gets older and I told her that before she starts she needs to have an open forum with a bunch of experienced RVers to get their ideas, and then solicit additional feedback from them on her plans before she starts construction. Many of the parks we have stayed at appear to have been built by people who have never owned an RV or stayed in a campground before.
We left Thessalon on Sunday morning and drove ~2/3 the way to Ottawa, spending Sunday night in Mattawa. The campground was on a small lake, and the owner said that the water in the lake was warm. It was almost 7 PM by the time we got to the campground, but the kids wanted to go swimming so I took them down there while Karen got dinner ready. Apparently they have a different definition of warm in Ontario than we do in Oregon. Water in most lakes in Oregon is cold even in the summer, but at least we normally say it is cold. In Ontario I think they must say the water is warm if the ice on the lake has been melted for more than a couple of weeks. Seriously, it wasn’t quite that cold, but I thought the kids were going to chip a tooth based on the uncontrollable chattering of teeth that accompanied the shivering when they got out of the water. On Monday we resumed our trek east to Ottawa, arriving early in the day. Note that arriving early for us means we got there by 5 PM! Karen did laundry while I worked on getting the blog updated. We spent 2 nights at this campground on the southern outskirts of town.
On Tuesday we drove into Ottawa which is the capital of Canada. We found a central location to park and spent the day walking around town to see the sites that we wanted to see. We started on Parliament Hill, seeing the capital buildings and the grounds. We also saw the changing of the guard that is an elaborate ceremony that takes ~40 minutes. We then headed over to the Hard Rock Café for an early lunch, and then took a tour of the Canadian Mint. The had an interesting scale there that told you how many troy ounces you weighed, followed by how much you would be worth if you were made out of pure gold. After visiting the mint we went across the river into Québec and spent the rest of the day at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. This is an awesome museum. We spent most of the time going through a very interesting and comprehensive exhibit on the history of Canada. The display takes you from east to west through Canada as you go forward in time from the first European settlement of Canada (the Norse) to the present. There are many life-size exhibits which made it very interesting, especially for the kids. We also spent some time in the Children’s Museum. The kids could have spent a couple of days there. It was huge, and Karen said it is by far the best children’s museum that she has been to. There were other exhibits in the museum that looked worthwhile, as well as other things in Ottawa that would be interesting to see but we needed to move on so after a very busy day (and 4 pairs of tired feet) we moved on east the next day.
Other notes: The campground in Thessalon was a beautiful setting on the shore of Lake Huron. The setting was fine, and the people were nice, but the utilities were all very poor. The water pressure that night varied from a small trickle to nothing, forcing us to use water from our tank. We suposedly had a 30A plug-in, but they must have had too much total load on their power lines, or too small of gauge wire for the length of run that they had to our site. We tried to use the microwave, and it didn’t sound right at all (the fan was and the turn table were going too slowly), and the lights dimmed when you tried to run it. I didn’t have a meter to check it, but the voltage was apparently very low. We didn’t use anything that had a motor or was sensitive to voltage level while we were there. Finally, the sewer connection was basically worthless. Instead of having a sewer line in the ground with a vertical connection, the sever line was 4” PCV pipe running on top of the ground, and almost flat. It didn’t seem like there was nearly enough slope for it to work, but I tried to empty some water from one of the gray water tanks the next morning, and sure enough, most of the water just came out the end of the sever pipe onto the ground. So, we went to the dump station instead of using the sewer connection. While this campground had issues with all the utilities, lots of campgrounds have at least some problems with their infrastructure design. Probably half the places we have stayed with full hook ups have had brain dead sewer connections. Our site in Maryville, MT had the sewer connection located at the highest point in the camp site, at least 12” higher than the ground level by the trailer. We have also had several sites where the riser for the sewer pipe was sticking 8-12” out of the ground. It is kind of hard to get water to flow up hill! Based on our experiences we normally just ask if they have a site with electric and water and plan on using the dump station when we leave rather than get a full hook up site. Unfortunately, most of the sites that are big enough to fit our trailer have full hook ups, so we get the worthless sewer connection rather we want it or not. We also had a couple of other campgrounds beside the one at Thessalon where the voltage on the electric service seemed very low so we minimized our electricity use. Water has been fine everywhere except for Thessalon.
The other problem with many campgrounds is their road/site layout. A large number have the RV parking pad at a right angle to the access road. That coupled with narrow roads and other obstacles makes it difficult to get into many sites even though they advertise themselves as “big rig friendly”. While many of these parks were likely designed when the average RV was shorter, if they had simply made the RV parking pad angle back ~30 degrees from perpendicular it would make backing into the sites MUCH easier regardless of the length of your rig. Adding obstacles like posts and garbage cans right at the front of the site also adds unnecessarily to the challenge. I do have to say that I am getting much better at getting into tight spaces, although I am still far from being an expert.
Next up: Québec City, Québec
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