Summer Vacation Day 2: Gilmore The Merrier

These posts are meant to be quick updates about our summer vacation with the RV.  Day one found us driving…and driving…..and driving.  Day two would start out a bit rough and have some annoying stuff in the middle, but turned out mostly okay.

After a long day of driving yesterday, I was in a hurry to get the trailer setup.  Once it was level and the electric and water were hooked up I went inside to sit down and catch my breath.  I didn’t bother with the sewer pipe hookups.  This morning, my wife asked me, “Where are the sewer hookups?  I don’t see anyone else with theirs connected.”  I’ll be honest, I was running so far behind planning our summer vacation, I can’t even recall if I knew there were no hookups or not.  If I had to guess, I think it was purely something I overlooked.

Why do sewer hookups matter, you ask?  When you consider everything that goes into getting the trailer set up once you pull into camp, the last thing you want to do is have to break it all down again prior to departure.  With no sewer hookups, the gray and black water tanks fill up fast.  Heck, our teenager was pretty good at filling the gray tank up with a long shower the first few times we camped.

There’s only two ways to dump the tanks when you don’t have a sewer hookup at your individual campsite.  The first is to drive to the dump station.  Every campsite has one.  There’s generally a line in the morning as people leave camp and need to dump their tanks prior to hitting the road.  And, you need to clean up and repack your sewer hoses.  Then, if you’re like us and not ready to check out, you would need to head back to your campsite and set everything up again.  A royal pain in the butt.  The only other way to dump the tanks is with a honey wagon/pump service.  We don’t own a honey wagon and our campsite doesn’t have a service to pump our tanks.  SIDE NOTE: probably the happiest I’ve ever been at a campsite was when someone shared with me that you could pay a nominal fee (anywhere from $5 to $15 per day) to have someone pump your gray and black water tanks for you.  For me, there is no better investment at a campsite.  Period.  The campsite we’re at has reasonably clean bathrooms and communal showers, so there’s a decent chance we can make it to our check-out date without needing to empty our tanks.

Gilmore Girls Country

Today was all about our daughter and her favorite TV show of all time, Gilmore Girls.  While the show is over 20 years old, our daughter is crazy about it.  The creator of Gilmore Girls got the inspiration for a number of small towns in Connecticut.  I originally learned this reading a blog post by my friend Tamara, who writes We 3 Travel.  She and I actually podcasted on this during the pandemic.  Based on the location of our campsite, we had sort of the perfect “Gilmore loop”.

For those of you not familiar with the show (I sure wasn’t) it’s the story of a mom and her daughter and it mirrors some pretty cute towns quite well.  We ended up at Theo’s Diner, a gazebo, a cute bookstore, a really expensive boutique hotel and a rolling town green (do you think the hotel requires you to dump your own black tanks?).

A long day, but one that our teenage daughter isn’t soon to forget.  On the way back to the campsite, we stopped for a few quick pictures at ESPN headquarters, which is across the street from the campground.  Not sure if they do tours, but there’s no time budgeted in the trip for that.

Continuing our theme of my utter enjoyment of all things camping, our son promptly locked us (and him) out of the trailer when we got back to camp.  Thankfully, I was able to jimmy a window open and my wife had laid the keys to the trailer within arm’s reach of that window.  If that wasn’t the case, I’m not entirely sure what Plan B was.  Dinner was back at the campsite where I promptly burned some chicken trying to learn how to cook on our new firepit.  It can’t all be glamorous on a camping trip!

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