This campground system that we belong to has some maintenance “issues”. Its not unusual for their hot tubs to be working but you sure don’t want to count on them. Their streets and access roads are uniformly bad – the access road at Colorado River has been reverted to gravel from the nearly impassable pavement that was there two years ago. Two days ago we realized that we didn’t have any water here at Lake Conroe.
No water in an RV shouldn’t be a big problem if the residents were halfway prepared but in this case we weren’t. For whatever reason we had let our main tank get down to nearly empty so that it only lasted a couple hours with no incoming water and then we were out. Along with a lot of the other neighbours because apparently they weren’t prepared either. And the management hadn’t bothered to give us any warning which they clearly could have. As it turned out they had the water back on briefly yesterday morning and we happened to notice that it was on so we were able to get the main tank substantially full which left us relatively impervious to the painfully slow progress of the repairs.
The water lines here are only buried about 2 feet. I guess that’s about 22 inches deeper than a lot of Rick Wensley’s lines were buried at Noble’s Point but it seems a little shallow to me. As I already mentioned, they’ve had a record setting drought here and they have some pretty heavy clay in this area so likely the clay shrank enough to pull a connection apart. Whatever the cause it took them the best part of 4 hours to locate the break and then a couple hours of dewatering before they could glue everything back together again.
We like to go out for dinner about once a week so yesterday we found a local Mexican restaurant and ate dinner there with another couple from the campground. We met Dan and Patsy at Lake Medina and have been stalking them ever since. They left Medina on Friday for Colorado River and we followed them two days later. Then they left Colorado River for Lake Conroe one day ahead of us so by the time we got here we felt like old friends. That’s a skill you need to pick up with our nomadic lifestyle – how to meet people quickly. Too often we end up meeting someone the day before one or the other of us leaves for parts unknown but this time we’ve had 4 weeks to get to know each other. Today they left and we don’t plan to follow them this time but we got to know each other well enough that we’ll likely stay in touch.
I talked to my buddies at Navasota on Friday afternoon to confirm that they had actually finished with the concrete pour. Based on my reconnoiter in the morning I didn’t think there was a chance in hell that they’d be done and sure enough they wouldn’t have been but the contractor evidently convinced them to bring in reinforcements and that got them finished up. My guess is that their batch plant never did start working after I left and all the additional concrete came from somewhere else.
It was really good news that they were done because it means the concrete will have the whole weekend to cure. I need to drive on it while I’m placing the nodes and then I need to put rock bolts into it so I really didn’t want to be doing that on green concrete. Two and a half days isn’t overly long for a cure but it should be adequate to keep the rock bolts from pulling out when I tighten them.
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