We discover another beach - Cheeka meets her first snake!

The last time we went to "our" beach at North Beach Park we decided to follow a small road that led into the field across the street from the park's entrance. It was a pleasant walk as the roadway, shaded by trees on each side, lead us through farmers' fields. What we didn't expect was to find another beautiful beach at the end of the road.

We walked as far as we could and the beach kept transforming from nice fine sand to flat rocks, to pebbles, to thousands of tiny shells and back to sand. There are very nice spots there. Cheeka met her first snake. Actually, she almost walked right on it! We also saw some Sandpipers and of course Gulls. It's unreal to walk along a body of water like lake Ontario that looks so much like an ocean. You expect to see dolphins arching their backs over the water.

I had Cheeka jumping over puddles. Great fun! She doesn't like to get her feet wet. I don't know if I'll ever get her to go in the water. She won't even drink from the shore if there are waves. She'll wait to find a puddle somewhere. It seems that she likes drinking from streams and lakes if she can. I think she likes the idea of roughing it. Makes her feel like a real dog. That's when she's not playing baby princess in her pajamas on the couch back at home. Then she forgets completely that she's a dog and just wants to be held like a baby or hug us while putting her head on our shoulder. She's quite the character!

We also briefly saw a grebe of some kind. He was quite far by the time we got there and thus the picture is grainy. But we think it's a Red Necked Grebe. Not quite sure. We're terrible with knowing the species of birds, etc. although we're both very interested in spotting them. I'll see a bird and ask: "Glen, what is that?" And he'll respond: "It's a bird of some kind." "Thanks Glen, you're a great source of information."

Today is a cold day but we'll probably go back to this new beach called Pleasant Bay which we have since learned is Crown Land so we'll be able to take Cheeka there all summer next year as she's not allowed on the beach in the provincial park. Maybe we'll eventually get her to enjoy cooling off with a swim. Who knows? Until then we continue to enjoy our new surroundings and exploring.

Be safe, be happy, be healthy.

Our beach and waterfront in Prince Edward County

When we moved here from Ridgeway, we had no idea what to expect. Bay Meadows Park was cheap to live at and they offered us the rest of the season free if we signed up for a seasonal site next year. Great deal! They had all the necessary hook ups and free WiFi. We had visited it once and saw that the property stopped at lake Ontario. Yes, it is a waterfront property!

What we didn't expect is that the wild rice filled bay is home to Great White Egrets, Great Blue Herons, Mute Swans and unidentified birds that we can hear in the bushes but cannot see. It is wonderful to take a leisure walk down to the small dock and always see something interesting (to us anyway).

We plan to take some chairs and our books and sit on the dock to read. It is very peaceful and breezy. Very nice spot and there is never anyone else there.

Our other discovery is North Beach Provincial Park which is exactly 3 minutes from our place by car. We only take the car when we take the dog with us but otherwise we bike there and it takes us anywhere from 12 to 15 minutes. What a nice long beach! It is always windy there so the waves are quite large which makes the lake (Ontario) really look like the ocean. The water is very clear and it is a sandy bottom. You can walk out for quite a distance and it is still shallow which makes me brave to go play in the waves. The park closed after Labor Day weekend but people park on the road and walk in. I truly feel like I am on vacation somewhere tropical there. We have gone several times with the intention to read but the sound of the waves and the wind is so distracting that we both end up just sitting there and looking at the ever changing water.

We have seen quite a few birds there also. Glen photographed the cutest little sandpipers while I was making sure Cheeka was staying close to me so she wouldn't disturb them. Those long-legged little birds looked like they were doing a dance with the waves. In and out. Forward and back. Their little feet going very fast to catch the wave and then to run from it.

There is also the beach cleaning crew. Turkey vultures are always on the lookout for dead fish being washed ashore. Then they can appear in great numbers to clean up the carcass. After a while nothing is left. We saw them around a dead Cormorant the other day. When we went back he was gone.

Poor Cheeka didn't know what to think of these big birds! She would go bravely towards them then stop and turn to us with a questioning look: Should I chase them? Should I keep going forward? She played it safe and remained a good distance away.

The downturn to Bay Meadows? NO TV! Not one single channel! We bought some DVDs on sale at Walmart the other day and were so excited to watch something on TV! But now I have discovered that I can watch Netflix on the laptop. It doesn't work on any other devices but there. If we hook up the laptop to the TV we see the image but can't hear the sound through the TV only coming faintly through the laptop. We're not really good at figuring this out so we'll buy a speaker so we can watch Netflix on the TV. So excited! It's amazing how little things can make one so happy when before those things were taken for granted.

It seems that since we took the leap towards to more affordable living, good things are happening. Like we needed to do this to find ourselves again and love again. The stress generated by financial woes can really destroy a relationship. Also being free to do as we please with no real obligations is so liberating! This is the second time in my life that I feel the universe was waiting for me to make the first step. The other time was when I left my first husband. It just goes to say that nothing can happen unless YOU take the first step or leap into the unknown.

It's a good life after all.

Making it home

Most travel trailers are decorated in the neutral colours of beige and brown. The lady parked beside us in Ridgeway called her couch: my plastic couch the colour of death. Actually our couch is not too bad except that it is fabric and it is a tweed-like brown which would show every white hair our dog sheds. So we keep it covered with throws in an off-white colour which we have to wash quite often (shows you how dirty even a little dog can be).

The first thing I did is remove the mini-blinds that adorned the kitchen's two small windows. In order to close or open these windows, you had to pass your hand through the blinds to reach the wheel we turn to operate the window. Needless to say that when we bought the unit, the mini-blinds were already bent out of shape in that area. Also, we couldn't raise them up as they were attached to the wall at the bottom. So out they went and I also removed the cornices with great difficulty (but nothing would have stopped me) and recovered them and then attached a single panel to the cornice's inside (please note that the panel is lined with insulating material to keep the heat or the cold at bay) that I roll up and attach with ribbons or let down. Easy, practical and cute.

This is what it looked like before.

I'm loving the splash of colour! Then the other cornices started to look out of place to me. Each window also had wooden panels that ran on both sides instead of drapes. Those panels were brown. So the panels came out first. It also gave better access to those wheels to open and close the windows. Then I was pondering what kind of fabric I should use to recover the rest of the cornices when I decided to paint them. I had heard of people painting fabric with chalk paint and I had the right colour chalk paint leftover from another project. What I did though is rub them with a damp cloth after painting them which let the existing pattern show through. Brilliant! It looks really good and cost me nothing. See for yourself:

Yes, that is MeMe looking devilish on the top of her "tree". So now that I have painted the cornices I am looking to find a good bargain in either ready made insulating drapes or fabric and liner. I think I will use an off-white colour to brighten the interior. Even though we have pleated blinds that work quite well, they don't really insulate that much and the windows are single panes which lets in heat and cold. My kitchen panels have made a tremendous difference in keeping the heat from the scorching sun out of that area so I expect the drapes to do the same to keep our heat in the trailer during the colder months. We are leaving for the south at the end of October but it can get pretty cold before that. Just getting ready for it!

Here I am painting a cornice:

You can see the difference in colour! Also note the pillow in the same fabric as the kitchen windows. Can you see Cheeka right there with me on the couch?

I love our tiny home! I plan to do a lot more decorating in the future but I have to take it easy for Glen as he's very reluctant to change anything! I do want to paint the walls in an off-white as the beige is quite depressing. But I'll wait a month or two...

Our stay in Ridgeway, Ontario

As you probably know, our first stop after picking up the trailer was at Knight's Hide Away Campground in Ridgeway, Ontario which was close to Fort Erie and Niagara Falls.

I could have kissed the lady at the office when she told me that our site was a pull-through. No backing up! Although I have driven and backed-up on occasion a 6-horse trailer, it has been a very long time so I wasn't as sure of my skills as a trailer backer-upper anymore.

The campground was OK. Nothing fancy but it had a fairly nice pool and a small store. There was also a kids' playground from the 1950's complete with steel slide that would burn your legs as you would slide down when the sun was shining on it all day. The old steel teeter totter brought back memories also.

They also offered an adult only WiFi room since the only place you could get access to the internet was at the store/office. The room had old tables, a relic of a computer and it was sweltering hot in there. Thanks for letting me in this fabulous place to work or view my emails and facebook. So most time I would sit in the games room which at least would get a breeze once in a while through the open side where the weird little cars that you peddled like a bike were kept. We did get the internet once in a while in our trailer because of a quite expensive antenna that was supposed to pick up internet hotspots from a distance. It actually worked quite well once all the vacationers were gone after the long weekend.

Talking about long weekends! This place would get packed with tenters every long weekend (we hit two) and would be very busy during the regular weekends also. The campground always put on a dance on Saturday nights and the music would go on way past the curfew of 11 pm. We would go to bed hearing mostly the base go popum popum pum popum. I ended up knowing by heart the base partition of some of the most popular songs. Once the fire ban was raised after several nights of steady rain, it was nice to see all the camp fires with people sitting around them into the night. Firewood is not in our budget so we enjoyed our neighbor's fire pit.

We did meet some very nice people there, a couple from Texas and a woman who had just started full-timing by herself along with her beautiful Greyhound dog. I have remained in contact with them. Our immediate neighbors across from us were there when we arrived and were there when we left but never spoke to us or even looked at us. Strange couple with 4 dogs in tow. The dogs would spend the day in their trailer barking their heads off while they were gone to work (I think). They would take the dogs out for a walk around the campground and then back in the trailer. Not much of a good life if you ask me. The lady had amazing beautiful grey/silver hair down to her waist that she wore in a ponytail most times. I dream of having hair like that.

We did find a nice conservation park about 10 minutes from the campground where we took Cheeka for a walk almost every day. There was never anyone there so we could let her go off leash so she could run like the wind when she felt like it. She does get those spurts of energy when she runs widly and fast with a smile on her face. I started giving her a treat after those runs to show my admiration for her agility (as she often does that off the trail, jumping over branches and darting trees) so now sometimes, she'll run a small circle around me at top speed and stop dead for a treat. Smart eh?

The town of Ridgeway is really cute but I failed to get any pictures of it. The town of Crystal Beach has its own charm too and what I liked were the bikes hung on hydro posts painted different bright colours and surrounded by colourful flowers.

Crystal Beach also has a beautiful public beach (hence the name) and also a smaller beach by a park. We ate at the restaurant by the park which had a terrace right on the water. It was an excellent meal with a million dollar view!

We also walked in a bog - Wainfleet Bog. The first time we tried to walk there we were stopped by a park official because of high risk of fire. They had in fact had a fire there recently and were not taking any chances. We went back after the rains and the lift of the fire ban and were able to walk there. This bog is the result of a pocket of lake Ontario that used to pool there millions of years ago and has created this huge area of rich spongy soil very comfortable to walk on. I kept thinking of what a nice footing it would be for horses! We did reach the area that had burned and it was eerie to see all the burnt trees standing there with burnt leaves still attached. What devastation a fire can cause! I must mention here that the "bridges" we had to cross were very primitive. Reminded me of pictures and movies I saw of my dad on fishing trips having to cross makeshift bridges with their jeep. You would never see that in Burlington as people there would surely fall and break a leg or something.

We also visited Short Hill Park which was right beside a nice vineyard. The grapes looked ripe and ready to pick! There was a trail there that is paired with a trail in Africa to give the African people the same experience we have here. Quite interesting.

All in all our time spent in Ridgeway was pretty good even though we were trying to organize our space in the trailer and get used to the different rhythm of life that is the RV life. It is weird at first to think that you don't have to get up in the morning for anything in particular and you can stay up late at night if you want - but we would be ready for bed around 9 since it would get pretty boring reading and playing games on our tablets - remember we rarely got TV channels.

The next blog will be about our first move to another location with the trailer fully stocked. Stay tuned!

It's not all fun and games!

When we picked up our RV the battery was nearly dead. We were told that it would charge while driving to our destination about an hour away. When we got to our campsite and started to set up, we realized the battery was still completely dead. Being newbies we didn’t know that if we plugged into shore power we would have power for everything. So we set up using the manual option for the tongue which I surprisingly remembered how to do, only to find out that once we plugged in the power to move the tongue up and down worked! Lesson learned!

We were really proud of ourselves for having been able to level the rig, hook it up all nicely with all necessary gadgets we had bought – water purifier, surge protector with a lock so we don’t get it stolen as they are quite expensive, water pressure regulator, we have it all as I was reading a lot of blogs and watching a lot of YouTubes before we set out on our journey and everything that was recommended was quickly ordered through Amazon.

The first day was spent mostly doing trips back and forth to our apartment to move everything with the truck back to the camper. We hardly used the toilet. I think you know where this is leading to – poop talk! You see, I am renowned to talk about poop in company. It’s normally dog poop but can deviate to any other kind. Anyhooo, the second day our toilet started to gurgle when we flushed – not a good sign. It then was quite evident that there was a blockage as nothing was really going down anymore. Get my drift? Really not good. So I call the dealer and am told that we have an appointment to bring the rig in their shop for the next week. Excuse me but we are in the middle of moving, there is stuff everywhere and there is no way that we can get it all organized so we can move the rig. I explained that we are also new to this so it’s a huge inconvenience to have to hook up and move at this point. Could they send someone over? So our request was sent over to the person in charge of road crew who happened to be new to the job and I think was overwhelmed by the number of calls, emails, requests she was getting. To make a long story short, we ended up having to go ourselves to the dealer (without the RV) and demand to talk to the owner or manager. We got to meet with the owner of the business who was very nice and understood our concern completely. He got our salesman to come over and the woman in charge of road crew. He told them to do whatever was needed to fix our problems (we were also missing 2 window screens making those windows impossible to open unless we wanted to share our home with flies and spiders). It took quite a few days to get someone to come and fix our toilet which ended up having been installed incorrectly thus the seal was half blocking the hole which quickly blocked with “you know what”. I must say that our dealer did all they could to accommodate us as they eventually had to hire a guy that used to work for them but was now operating his own mobile business since their own crew was overbooked.

Now we have a fully functioning bathroom but are still missing our window screens. That issue is with the manufacturer who is acting like they have never seen our model of RV before. We had to measure the windows and take pictures. Then the guy that fixed our toilet was asked to measure, draw a sketch and take pictures. And would you believe that later, when the dealer’s road crew was at our campground, they were also sent to take measurements and take pictures of those windows as the manufacturer – Keystone – needed more precise information in order to fulfill the order. It’s hard to believe that the people who built your RV don’t have any idea of what a window measures or looks like in a particular model. Crazy!

So for now, all is good! Everything works perfectly. We certainly got to test the A/C to the limit with all the very hot weather we’ve been having. We didn’t have A/C in our apartment so this is pure luxury!

Pura Vida!