Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh

Do you remember the song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh”? I know some of you will, but for the rest, it is a musical letter home from Camp Granada by Allen Sherman, recorded in June of 1963. If you need refreshing, click here to listen before reading further. This post is a first for Fickstravels.com. I’m excited to present The Princess, making her writing debut on this site, with the following excerpt from a letter (read: email) to a cousin back east. Really, it is from an email she sent.

Dear Cousin Barry,

Since you are a captive audience at home, I will tell you about our trip so far, but I am using my phone, so there will be typos. 

We got off to a rocky start but kept our good humor.  A cardinal rule of owning a camper is to test all the systems after winter storage.  I think a two-day trip is always a good way to start the travel season. Dennis decided it was not all that important to do because everything was working last October. The first night out, we stayed at a dry-camping stop.. No running water.  We had a broken water pump. So, we used water from a jug, skipped baths, and I managed the bathroom issue. We found a repair shop nearby that had a spot open the next morning. After a four-hour unplanned stop, we were on our way again to the next dry camping spot. All was now good in the world, or so we thought.

The next stop was the Missouri Basin Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, about five hours down the road. We got the camper set up in the parking lot and turned on the water pump, but all we got was a lot of air and a little water. After a frantic call to the repair shop before it closed for the day, we learned that the new water pump sort of works, but apparently, there is a lot of air in the system from the installation.  The solution is to just use it, and the air will eventually work its way out. At the end of the second day, we sort of have water. I took this opportunity to again explain to Dennis the importance of a two-day shake-down trip at the beginning of the year.

We have continued to “dry camp,” meaning we use only the water in our camper’s 80-gallon tank (which normally lasts us 4-5 days if we are very careful). Water sputters, sprays, spits, and spurts. It does not flow.  A lot. For days. In the sink. In the shower. Washing hair and doing dishes is a testament to my patience.  After running a lot of water through the pump, things improved a bit.

After a third night of dry-camping, we needed to find a place to empty the waste tanks and refill the fresh water. This should have been easy, but not so much. The only nearby place that was convenient was a giant Indian casino!  Very nice people, but stopping at a casino to empty our tanks was very odd to us. We circled the very large complex a few times before we actually found the free dump station. We were a little on edge because we still had hours of driving before the next dry camping spot.

On our way out, while trying to get directions back to our route, my phone was acting up, so I restarted the thing to fix the issue. Instead of turning off my cell phone, I hit “Factory Reset”. All of my contacts and important personal messages were gone. No problem. While trying not to throw up, we found a Verizon store only twenty minutes away and a wonderful, heavily tattooed person named Nick, with giant gears in his earlobes and very dark glasses, who is my new hero. Fortunately, unbeknownst to me, sometime in the past, I had saved everything to the cloud. After a long, few tense minutes, my new very best friend, Nick, was able to restore everything.  He also hid the factory reset button.  Down the road we went, this time to a commercial campground.

You may be interested to know that we use a system to monitor the camper’s level when we pull into a site. It is important for several reasons that the trailer needs to be level. This system has worked for years without a problem. Guess what, it no longer works properly. We are now using a carpenter’s level to see if the camper is level. The refrigerator, along with a couple of other things, works best when the camper is level. Plus, we sleep better when we are not on an incline.

To add to the fun, the camper’s backup camera keeps going out, so I have to, in a calming voice, direct Dennis backing the trailer in and out of places by saying “move to the driver’s side” or “too far, move to the passenger side”. We gave up on left and right ages ago.

I guess, in hindsight, the first week wasn’t too bad. We decided a long time ago that we can’t afford to bicker or get angry with each other on these trips, and that we need to get out of our funks as quickly as we can. It has been a very helpful strategy for this trip.

I’ll write again soon.

Sherrie