Delaware - Day 29 - countryside

Trap Pond State Park
Tuesday, 29 January 2019

pretty, isn't he?

On our second walk this morning along the lake we saw a Belted Kingfisher who obligingly stopped on a post for long enough that I could get a good look at him.  I knew him by his call but was glad to put a face to the voice.  Then Dexter saw him and jumped and the smart bird decided it was time to leave.

today's route

I dropped the dogs off at the day care place and set off on some errands.  It’d been way too long since I last did laundry, and I went to the Cheers-type place I went to before.  Clean, good machines, pleasant staff, not wildly expensive.  Hard to beat.

While the wash was washing I went a few stores down to the Ace Hardware because I’d run into a problem: the glass lid on my stove had lost one of the screws holding it on.  There’s a hinge part-way back that allows the front of the lid to fold back on the back.  Then there are brackets in the rear that attach the top to the stove top to allow the lid to fold all the way back out of the way of the burners.  It was a screw that attached the lid to one of those brackets that had come out.

closed

part-way open

fully open

I found the screw and part of the nut that held it on and discovered that part of the screw was sheared off and the nut had been broken to pieces.  I only found half of it.  It looked as if something heavy had whammed down on the screw and nut to break them off – but first off I’m dead certain I didn’t do that, and second how could that happen without risking major damage to the glass lid?  My own opinion is that they were shoddy parts in the first place and the act of opening the lid over and over had triggered some kind of split.

But whatever it was, I still needed to get that lid reattached.  The screw and the nut were plastic and the Ace Hardware didn’t have anything quite the same.  But the nice man that helped me came out to the RV to see for himself what I was trying to replace and then went back and picked out a screw and a nut and then a black casing for the screw to disguise from the top that it was silver and not black like the others.  The silver shows when it’s open (as you can see above) but so what.  I got a second set, just in case.

After the laundromat I went to a grocery store and this time went to a Harris Teeter Market, which has several stores in the area.  They're a small East Coast chain.  Really great store.  They had almost everything I was looking for, good produce, reasonable prices, nice staff.  Not something you can say about every grocery store.

Driving along a country road, I passed through an entire industrial area that belonged to Mountaire Co., which seems to be a very large chicken growing and processing operation.  All over the state I’ve passed what I was sure were chicken farms that had small signs by the road with the Mountaire name on them, and sometimes with cutesy names like Cheep Lodgings.  And along the road between Long Neck and Millsboro (it really was out in the country), I found a boatload of buildings and large trucks and various signs indicating various aspects of chicken processing, all with the Mountaire name on them.  So I was right.  Delaware really is in the chicken-growing business.

I stopped on the way back to the park to fill up with propane again.  I was only down to a quarter of a tank and figured it’d last overnight, but the weather forecast is ominous.  We’re expecting at least 2 days and 2 nights below freezing, so I knew I’d be using a lot of propane then.  But on Friday I leave for Maryland and wanted to fill up with propane before I left so I wouldn’t be having to hunt some down urgently in a new place when I had a reliable and reasonably priced source so near this campground.  But I’ve been told not to put in additional propane unless I’m below ¼ full and I figured the best way to guarantee I’d be down that low by Friday morning was to fill up today.  So I did.

When I got back to my campsite I filled up with water.  I’d been putting it off because of all the iron in this water, but I’ve been using my own tank for a week and knew it was getting low and didn’t want to be on an empty tank when it was freezing outside, making it hard to fill up.  I may end up out of water anyway if my water system freezes again like it did before, but hope on, hope ever, maybe it won’t happen this time and I’ll want water.  Of course, I bought several jugs of it to have just in case.

(I apologize for the weird changes in type size and spacing.  They happen when I use the word processing program I put on this computer - it's one that's free, so I live with the glitches.  I retype sections that are so weird they're distracting, but otherwise figure there's such a thing as too controlling for mental health.  Today's post is a result.)