Running back to Buchanan

I expect I’ll be posting this from Buchanan.  Our favorite spot on the street in Regina has let us down three times running now.  There are wifi hotspots in the major cities in Saskatchewan and one of them happens to be the street south of Wesley Church so we often park here overnight.  It makes for convenient access to Wascana Rehab (and church too for that matter but that never seems to be all that big an advantage).  However that service has been hors de combat the last three times we have been in Regina so we need to come up with a new Regina plan.  There’s other areas of town that are covered by the free wifi but none that are as convenient for parking a 60’ train like we travel with.

Tonight I’m waiting for Marilyn to come back from Toronto.  She’s stuck on the ground in Calgary right now waiting out a storm.  Westjet is my only airline but they have a bad habit of being late for their connections late in the day and tonight is no exception.  The storm is the excuse but I expect its just normal end of day Westjet scheduling.

I got my files in SW Sask wrapped up this morning and moved up to Regina.  I got to Wascana in time to visit with father while he ate supper and then took him for a walk in the park.  Then I went up to the NW end of town to pick up the booze that we put in storage before we crossed the US border.  After that I was in Home Depot for a very long time gathering up supplies to install a 50 amp service on the house in Buchanan as well as enough plumbing supplies to install a water hookup for the bus.  I need to have a closer look at the sewer before I will know what we can do in that regard.  I’m hoping there’s a conveniently located cleanout tee that we can dump into.  The alternative is something called a Sewer Solution which is a device for making shit run uphill. 

(from Buchanan) We arrived here early this afternoon after a stop in Whitewood to look at some more Assiniboia land.  The house was still here and maybe looked a little better than either of us remembered. 

Marilyn got the village organized to turn our water on tomorrow so that left me with a deadline to get the water ready to be turned on by tomorrow.  As so often happens in those situations, something that should have been dead simple turned into an ordeal but I think I now have it under control.  The town had disconnected the water at some point in the past and somebody had torn the whole system apart so there was no longer a connection to the town line.  That should have been a simple matter of connecting to a 3/4 inch copper line and reducing it down to 1/2 inch for the house but for some reason the 3/4 slip adapter I had wouldn’t go over the town water line.  I ended up making a run to Canora where I found a great little Home Hardware and bought a torch and some brass fittings.  Even the brass solder-to-pipe-thread adapter didn’t want to go on the town line but I finally managed to get it swelled enough by heating it and then was able to beat it onto the line.  I won’t know until tomorrow whether I was successful in my soldering efforts.

Well its tomorrow and the water worked out just fine.  The town guy came around about 8:30 and turned the water on without incident.  He came inside, ostensibly to read the water meter but I think he really just wanted to see inside the house.  My solder job appears to be holding.  This was my first experience with twist-on Pex connections.  Its pretty straightforward plumbing – more expensive than copper but a lot easier.

With the water out of the way I tackled the 50 amp RV plug installation.  That went well too so now we are plugged into a 40 amp service ( I put it on the range breaker which happened to be 40 amp).  It worked out that I could mount the plug on the corner of the garage so it even looks like it belongs.  We still haven’t figured out how to handle the sewer but we have water and electric so that’s 2/3 of the problem solved.

Meanwhile Marilyn was cleaning.  Some of the cleaning was leftover from the previous owners and some of it was cleaning up behind me.  All in all it didn’t look as bad as we remembered it.  And the basement was dry so that’s always a good thing.  I made a point of directing the drains away from the foundation before we left last time.  I think that was likely the problem – the previous owners had knocked the drain spouts off and the eaves were draining into the basement.  At least I hope that’s all it was.