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Because of Heidi’s discovery that Elaine Reid wasn’t a complete moron (well, hold that thought – there’s always room for stupidity), and the Yamaha generator didn’t seem to like the Omega HVAC system, I cancelled the remainder of my trip, took the RV home, emptied it, and took it back to Heidi’s.  It wasn’t going to be an immediate fix; as Terry had never seen this model of generator before and he suspected he’d need to order parts, I had to leave the rig with them.

It did eventually get fixed, was all under warranty, and Terry did say that it was an interesting problem to tackle.  I felt vindicated (frustrated, but vindicated).

But that means that, apart from a 3-day trip to a campground 20 minutes from my home, every one of my first summer’s trips had ended too soon, and under a shadow.  Bummer.

Last month, Lori & I absolutely melted in the Gaspe, on the days (well, really nights) when I was relying on the generator for our AC, and we couldn’t make it work.  Multiple phone calls to an on-the-whole pleasant and friendly, but still somewhat-exasperated mechanic at Heidi’s didn’t resolve the issue.

We would turn the generator on, then the AC, and if we so much as looked at the clock on the microwave, or flipped a single-bulb light switch, everything would simply shut down. 

After that trip, I took the RV up to Heidi’s (which is quite a pain, as it’s 90 minutes minimum from home and I either have to find a friend willing to follow me there and bring me home, or take two GO trains & an Uber) to my favourite mechanic, Terry.  He had looked it over, found everything to be working just fine, showed me that I was in all likelihood not flipping the breaker firmly enough, and sent me home.

Well guess what happened at Kismet?  It was a cold night, I turned the generator on, turned on the furnace, and click, after 5 minutes, everything shut down.  (Thank heavens for multiple duvets.)

So here we are again – I’m having to re-adjust the last few days of a well planned out trip, cancel Wiarton and south Georgian Bay, and head to Heidi’s.

This time, when Terry came trotting out saying it was working just fine, I made him watch me walk through the steps I follow and of course, wouldn’t you know it, it was working just fine.  We stood in the RV, scratching our heads, assuming that yet again, I was doing something wrong when using the generator whilst on the road.  Not sure why, but Terry turned on the AC one more time, waited 3 minutes, turned on the lights, and ah ha!!!!! everything failed.  Yay!!!!! (well, you know what I mean.)

This was a breakthrough – it wasn’t just me!  More to come on next steps.

One of my goals for my travels across Canada is to visit (and hopefully support) as many independent bookstores as I can.  I got to Parry Sound on a Sunday, so not a lot was open and the streets were pretty quiet.  My only previous experience of Parry Sound was visiting a boyfriend who had a cottage outside of town, and we pretty much spent all our time out on his boat (loved Henry’s Fish Restaurant). 

It was definitely not my most exciting day of travel, but there was one highlight – Bearly Used Bookstore.  I’ve never seen anything like this – the closest I can think of is one of those movie sets meant to show a quaint, old, overflowing, quirky bookshop from the 1950s.  Rooms, and rooms, shelves upon shelves, and stacks 8’ high, just piled up, with every type of book imaginable.  I don’t think this staff has ever met a book they have said no to.  There is a marginal sense of order (oh, who am I kidding, apart from some faded signage and a token attempt at cataloguing, this is what it would look like if you took The World’s Biggest Book Store, put the contents in a snowglobe, turned it upside down, and shook it).  I did find a couple of books to buy, but as someone who gets overwhelmed in department stores, I was only able to spend bout 45 minutes in there before admitting defeat and retreating to the local KOA (which was very nice).

The lady who runs Kismet Farm asked if I would mind waiting until 6pm to arrive.  No problem.  I left Bancroft at 5:55 and within 10 minutes I was wending my way along a very narrow, very rough backroad (inexplicably lined with mansions) to a farm lane out in the middle of nowhere.  The farmhouse looked like something from either a Nicholas Sparks or a Stephen King novel, dark wood, wooden porch, gingerbread scrollwork, uneven dormers (adorable or menacing, hard to say which).  Then the owner Roz came out, looking like a cross between Hansel & Gretel’s witch and an aging flower child.  She was absolutely lovely, but all this atmosphere, coupled with the fact that I had no internet, data, or telephone access up on this hillside, did make me a tad uncomfortable.  I sent texts to my sister, knowing they wouldn’t go that evening, but telling her where, if she never heard from me again, I had spent this last night of my life.  (She received them the next morning, and was relieved to hear my voice when I called her from Bancroft as soon as I could.)

Roz was lovely, as was her farm – I gave it a 5 star review in HH, and didn’t mention my irrational reaction to remote farm life.  (As I said, the road was full of huge houses and in the morning there were school buses going by – I was just being silly.)

Next stop was Bancroft, where I had booked a Harvest Host at Kismet Farms in Dung, Ontario.  Yes, Dung.  The farm’s mailing address is Dung, ON, but when you key it into Google, nothing shows up (no wonder, the shame of it all).  But it is Dung nonetheless.

Driving has been stressful, particularly going down hills.  You’re not supposed to ride the brakes, but this is an extremely heavy truck barrelling down a Canadian backroad hill, and it’s a tad freaky.  First thing: as you’re cresting the hilltop, make sure you’re already going slower than you might think.  Then, click on the tow-haul, which slows down the rate at which the truck shifts up a gear.  Then, shift into manual, and gear down.  Okay, that’s all very well and good.  But, once you’re at the bottom of the hill, it’s time to get back into gear and speed up to the speed limit.  Which is where the fun really begins.  I don’t if it’s my rig, or Ford trucks in general, or just that it’s new, but when I try to move the gear shift back from Manual to Drive, invariably it shifts into Neutral before I can pop it back into Drive (all while having palpitations and terror sweats).  One time, on the highway in Quebec, it actually jumped to Reverse for a nano-second – dear God, my 60+ heart.

So this trip to Dung through the Canadian Shield was a doozy, and I was glad to make it to Bancroft (Dung is a suburb of Bancroft it seems).  Kismet Farm couldn’t receive me until 6pm, so I had time to kill in Bancroft.  Unfortunately the local gallery was closed, so No Frills, Shoppers, and Timmies it was. 

But the reason I’m an idiot?  I have a friend from high school, whom I’ve only seen once since returning from Scotland.  Recently he & his partner Jen moved from London and set up a bed & breakfast in Bancroft.  Did it occur to me to let them know I was in town?  To let them know I had 90 minutes to kill that afternoon?  That I was going to be again killing time the next morning at the Tim Hortons?  No, of course it didn’t.  Instead, I sat, bored, reading a magazine and eating timbits.  It was a full 4 weeks later before it hit me – why hadn’t I called Pete?  Doh.

I couldn’t get a campground any closer than 25 minutes south of downtown Ottawa at Camp Hither in South Gloucester.  It was perfectly nice, but more of a motel than a hotel, if you know what I mean.  I took an Uber into town and had a lovely day of art galleries, museums, a walk along the canal past all the locks, and a wonderful (and slightly winey) lunch at Aiana, a ‘Canadiana terroir’ restaurant.  I had the venison, and that, along with the midday wine, made an afternoon nap back at the campground mandatory.  Only regret – I had wanted to do a canal cruise but the timing just wouldn’t work.  Note: a lot more homeless than I had expected.

I did my ‘maiden voyage’ with Scout, Gaspé with LL, and Rockwood with JK – now it’s my first truly solo trip.  Off to eastern Ontario and Georgian Bay, staying in KOAs, private parks, and Harvest Hosts (one is a gin distillery).   A major concern with Class A and Class C motorhome travel is: parking in town.  This isn’t like when my family would park the travel trailer at the campsite, unhitch the car, and drive off to restaurants, beaches, and tourist sites. No, my dwelling comes with me, and it’s cumbersome.

As part of my planning, I asked Copilot: Please list good parking places for my huge motorhome, that are easy parking and are convenient to access the centre of the following towns: Peterborough, Perth, Ottawa, and Parry Sound.  Its reply was both amusing and very helpful: Got it — you’re looking for practical “where can I park a 27-ft rig and still walk into town” suggestions. Here are reliable options in each of the towns you mentioned, focusing on larger surface lots that don’t feel tight.  So friendly, so helpful, so chatty – but it does take getting used to.

Peterborough has a lovely campground right in town, with walking trails to the lift lock, the Canoe Museum, and into town.  The Canoe Museum was excellent!  I cannot recommend it enough.  I was disappointed that the lift lock museum wasn’t open – I headed on to Peterborough’s Heritage Museum, which was okay, not the best small town museum I’ve visited, but fine.

My friend & neighbour Jodi would love to try out my motorhome and see how her aggressive dog Brinn would handle travelling.  Three days at Rockwood (30 minutes form home) should tell us all we need to know. 

I love Rockwood – I used to canoe here with my friend’s kids.  We got a great site, which I was able to back into, no help from anyone – quite proud of that accomplishment.

Lovely hiking trails, tranquil setting (well, you can occasionally hear the cars on Hwy 7 and the train at the level crossing), and only 45 minutes to Elora, St Jacob’s, & Elmira.

Jodi took Brinn home each day while we sightsee’ed (sightsaw?) and picked her up each afternoon.  I thought she did very well while in the park – she may have scared away a few people (and dogs) with her bark, but I htink that’s a good thing. And it was a nice three days.

I’ve booked the RV in at Heidi’s for a series of repairs.  But it will have to stay overnight.  I’m discovering the major drawback in purchasing a vehicle from a dealership 90+ minutes away.  But I have a cunning plan – a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel (IYKYK).  My friends from Timmins are driving down to Milton on Friday, passing right by Heidi’s.  I’ll drop the RV off in the morning, spend a couple of hours in the waiting room reading, and catch a ride home with them.  Perfect.

Stopped at Tim’s on the way up to Heidi’s and picked up some tim-bits for the staff – that was a big hit!  They weren’t going to be able to look at it that day, but that was fine, I already knew that.  What I had miscalculated was when my friends would be arriving – I had just assumed that people driving from Timmins to Milton (about 8 hours) would leave before 10am.  But no, they didn’t text that they were leaving until after noon, so I was at Heidi’s from 10:30am to 6pm.  But, it turned out that that worked out very much in my favour.  The combination of bringing donuts, chatting up the service staff, and showing complete patience whilst waiting meant that the wonderful Tina cajoled/coerced the mechanic to at least take a look at my rig and walked me through every repair required.  He showed me how to re-set my generator and acknowledged every single one of my teeny-tiny requests.   I really do love the service team at Heidi’s.

I wish I could say the same of the staff at the Heidi’s campground.  Because the Service Centre closed at 5 and my ride wasn’t arriving until after 6, Tina suggested I go and wait at the attached campground; just tell the staff what I was doing and they’d let me sit by the pool.  Oh, no, they would not.  This was my third set of interactions with the campground staff, and all I can say is, they are not a pleasant bunch.  (Maybe not happy in their jobs?)  Anyhoo, I was welcome to sit on the bench out front, if I had to.  Lovely.

Edit: The RV came back, all nice and healthy.  Every break fixed, every squeak gone.  Yay. But I still have to arrange undercoating and sealant.

This motorhome, brand-spankin’ new, has bugs.  I’ve started a list of all the repairs I want done.  The generator, a sticky slide-out, broken clasps, unstable passenger seat (it was most disconcerting when I took a corner, and LL’s seat suddenly shoved back and swung around 130° so she was facing the dining table behind me!), and a broken closet railing.  We refer to this list as the RV F*#% Up List.  It’s getting longer.  Oh dear.