Wyoming - Day 23 - in the campground

Rawlins KOA, Rawlins

Thursday, 23 September 2021

I put in a little time working on the blog, but much of the day was spent dealing with the kitchen drain.  It had been emptying more and more slowly but, by today, it was just barely draining at all.  I'd never cleaned that one out but have done the one in the bathroom several times so figured the kitchen wouldn't be a problem.

Turned out it was.  The 2 drains aren't made the same, for one thing.  And for another, I've tightened the nuts in the bathroom so they don't leak but are still fairly easy for me to take off.  Not so the kitchen.  These 3+ years of being used without ever having been taken apart sealed the connections pretty well, and it took a lot of work for me to get it opened up.  Not to mention that I had to take all the drawers out just to get to it, which are their own set of nuisances.

Anyway, I did both drains and got the kitchen one back together okay, except it just didn't feel like I was getting it tight, and I sure didn't want to test it out by running water into it.  And the bathroom one, that I thought I was so familiar with, I just couldn't figure out where all the pieces went so it wasn't usable at all.

I went to the campground office to ask if they knew a handyman-type who could help me.  They gave me the names of RV plumbers, but I said it wasn't an RV problem, it was an ordinary connection problem and I didn't have a wrench the right size for the kitchen.  So the owner volunteered.  It was several hours before he could get free to come over, but he did.  He had a pair of Channellocks that did the trick in the kitchen, and he figured out that I had the bathroom pieces in the wrong order and got them put together.  But while he was doing all that, he pointed out that I still had partial clogs in the u-bends in both sinks that would cause me trouble sometime.

I figured out that they're also probably the sources for some of the unpleasant odors I smell now and then - though it's hard to pick apart the various smells from the dogs and other things going on here.  But I decided to buy some Channellocks of my own and clean the drains more thoroughly when I have a little time.

At least now the kitchen drain drains, and the bathroom drain too drains well.

I was glad to see that this was a fairly comfortable campground, because I'd already made reservations here for the last 5 days of the month.  It was nice to see that it wasn't a sea of gravel or totally lacking in trees or too small for us to walk very far or filled with prickly plants - those kinds of problems we've been finding.  And obviously the owners were very accommodating.