Victoria's Monday

New growth against a deep blue sky - it's definitely spring!

Better weather again this Monday morning; still not warm enough but very pleasant anyway. The same could not be said for the forecast, though, with thunderstorms predicted for Tuesday morning. With the threat of horrid weather we did a hasty re-jig of our plans and decided to set off for home on Monday evening rather than the expected Tuesday morning. Certainly we'd paid for the extra night, but the prospect of trying to pack up a tent on a wet and muddy site was just too much so we elected to use the sunshine to our advantage. Because we had that extra night, we were in no rush to leave by the usual 2pm check out deadline, opting to stay all afternoon and have supper before heading home. That gave us the opportunity to slow down a bit and watch all the other campers packing up, which is always good sport.

I did take the tadpoles into Goderich for the celebrated McDonald's Breakfast in the morning. It's not my idea of a good start to the day but they like it. The tyre had held up overnight but I called in at the gas station and put a heap more air into it, just to be on the safe side. Yes, I was going to drive home, hitched up, with a dodgy tyre but I reasoned that on the fairly slow roads between Goderich and home we'd be fine. I know it's not the safest thing to do but then we did drive from Florida's Gulf Coast to Knoxville in Tennessee by way of Birmingham, Alabama, with a big bolt in the tyre, albeit that I wasn't aware that it was there at the time.

Being clever sorts, we took the tent down and started a gradual process of getting the bottom of it dried off by folding it up in parts and allowing the sun to work on the groundsheet. We had a bag if firewood to burn, too, so spent the afternoon in the watery sunshine, sat around the fire tending our steadily baking potatoes in the embers and letting the wood smoke get in our eyes. It's really nice to have a fire, it's sort of what camping's about, but boy does that smell ever hang around? I knew that laundry was going to be top priority on our return home.

So supper was served and eaten and we packed at a leisurely pace before hitching up and setting off for the dump station. We weren't sure just how full the waste tanks were, or indeed how full the freshwater tank was, because the maestro here buggered up the tank sensor panel and now it needs re-calibrating. A big "D'oh!" for Homer Toad there.

We eventually hit the road at about 7pm and headed south for home. As ever, the run was good although having consumed a bottle of water as I was driving I ended stopping in Bothwell to, er, empty some of it out. Fortunately we were towing our toilet behind us so we were able to "refresh" in comfort.

Back home in the dark, we backed onto the driveway, unhitched and set about getting some of the more immediate laundry into the machine. The whole trailer smelled of wood smoke inside so I reckon that was the sign that the trip had been pretty good. The Toadmobile's tyre was still good and not registering on the dash lights so the puncture must have been very slow indeed; I probably drove up to Goderich with the nail in the tyre, too. Hmmmmm.

Anyway, that's it for another trip. We have nothing planned for future runs yet so I can see I'm going to have to scrabble around for ideas for new blog posts. If you've enjoyed the record of this latest trip, why not let me know? This Interweb thingy is two-way ya know!

As an addendum to this post, I thought I'd mention that in looking for details of the Polsteam ship at Goderich, I discovered a website that tracks marine movements all over the world. Not only did it have the current location of that ship shown on Google Earth but the vessel's full details and its known routes and ports of call. You can imagine I spent a little time on that nerdy little website! www.marinetraffic.com