June 10 - The Incident of the tree in site 113

On June 10 we travelled from Chutes Provincial Park, north through Sault Ste Marie and on to Agawa Bay Campground in Lake Superior Provincial Park. The drive was lovely and easy. We stocked up on supplies in the Soo and arrived at the campground about 4:00pm

In order to understand any of this it is necessary for you to know that we have one 25 foot 30 amp electrical cord for TaJ, our 2017 R-pod. We have, up till now, have resisted buying a longer one, or a second one.

Agawa Bay Campground, in Lake Superior Provincial Park has 245 campsites, 38 of which are electrical. At this time in June the campground is virtually empty. This is a Saturday, in June, and there are just 15 sites in use here. Amazing place, right on the shore of the lake. When you register you simply pay for the number of days you want to stay and go find a site that suits you...none are reserved until after June 16.

There is one issue though, the electrical outlets are set up between campsites, sometimes more than 40, 50 and even 60 feet from where you want them to be. That was the case with site 113, the one we tried to get into in this epic fail.

In order to get to within 25 feet of the outlet, the length of our cord, we had to fit TaJ between two trees, kind of in the back corner of the site. I did a good job manuevering through until the last little bit...we did not exactly fit the space, so onward to plan B. As I tried to pull out of the slot I got too close to one of the trees and the wheel would not clear, so some backing and filling in order to get out would be needed. I've gotten pretty good at backing up and have gotten out of jams before, but I botched this one completely, going the wrong way as I backed, locking TaJ right up against the tree...not going to be easy to get out of here.

I borrowed a 6 foot long 2x6 board from another camper, put my front leveling block onto this piece of wood and went to lower the jack onto it to begin to change the angle at which we were attached to the tow vehicle. Our battery operated hitch jack decided to fail right then and there. The manual crank that comes with it is stored with my tire jack under all the tubs and milk crates that we use in our tow vehicle. So, we had to unload all that, manually crank the jack down onto the leveling block, on the 6 foot long 2x6 board so we could take our axe and, with the back end of it, pound our leveling block to slide the the front end of the trailer over 3 feet so we could rehook it and get out of this mess.

All this took a full hour and we finally extracted TaJ and moved on to settle in site 100. We had to borrow a second 25 foot electrical cord to finally hook up the electric and settle in for the night.

I will be buying a 50 foot electrical cord at the first opportunity. There are no pictures for this blog entry, thank goodness!

To top things off, we had a spectacular wind storm overnight. The wind howled and about 12:30am the R-pod shook and there was a tremendous bang just out back. It was so dark and stormy that we would not find out until morning that a 30 foot long branch had broken off a pine tree and just missed crashing on our roof.

The branch is in the foreground: