viewWednesday, October 23rd
Today was a good day. Mostly. It started with getting up and getting all my stuff packed and out to the Jeep, which was pretty uneventful. It was a bit of fun handling Monkey and crates full of stuff at the same time, but I managed somehow. One of the front desk ladies said hi to Monkey, and even though he was barking at her, she understand it was just cause he was a puppy, and in an unfamiliar situation, which made me feel a bit better about all of the drama I'm sure Monkey's been causing them over the last 9 days.
@deilann@tech.lgbt has had to deal with Molly having diarrhea all over his room and then tracking it everywhere, and he cleaned it up as best he could. We still got hit with a \$250 cleaning fee from WoodSpring, but that's a lot less than the AirBnB hosts have been charging us. Even with that and the $200 pet fee we already paid, it was not a bad price for 9 nights in 2 rooms.
I brought Monkey up to @deilann@tech.lgbt's room to reunite them before heading downstairs. Monkey and Spider were very happy to see each other and had to get in a reunion wrestling match before we could do anything else. Molly was hiding under the bed and went a little further under the bed. I took them all downstairs and they had a lot of fun running around for a bit. As I was loading up the Jeep, I called in our animal control officer to wrap up Monkey's quarantine.
Our animal control officer, who I will not name, was super-friendly and understanding, and told us off the record how very sorry she was that our first experience in Ankeny had us dealing with some of the most entitled assholes on the planet (that's a paraphrase, but not by much). The local police are obviously very used to dealing with these people and understood that it wasn't really any fault of ours that we got sucked into this mess. The lady who owned the little tiny toy breed puppy that she brought into the big dog park last week has apparently been making all sorts of posts on social media about us pushing her narrative about how her dog was attacked and how they need to add better security to the dog park and on and on. The cops had to have a talk with her about what was appropriate to say about other people on social media cause she'd put up a description of our car and asked her friends to help track us down. Anyway, it's done with now and hopefully this is the last we'll hear about it.
After we got out of the hotel, we went to Fleet Farm to pick up camping supplies. We have camping supplies already, but there are all elsewhere, so I had to get new everything. I got us a nice big tent and some good warm sleeping bags, fishing poles, fishing licenses, warm socks, and a nice 25 foot long extension cord, which should be plenty long enough. There were 50 foot cords as well, but I thought that would be ridiculous, too much storage, and more than we need when 25 should be plenty. It seems to be impossible to find an extension cord with a standard NEMA 5-15 plug that is rated for more than 15 amps, or to find a NEMA 5-20 extension cord. I know the 5-15 is only supposed to go up to 15 amps, but there are plenty on them on 20 amp breakers, including the one on our campsite. There must have been 50 different brands of extension cords there and not one rated more than 15 amps. I hope this will not cause any problems.
There were about 5 billion different choices for fishing poles and lures and bait and line, so I hope I got good ones. I needed to get something small that we could fit in the back of the Jeep with everything else, so I ended up getting some ones meant for ice fishing. The look kind of flimsy, but hopefully they'll be fine for the fish in the river here. Leo says we shouldn't have to worry about buying food cause he can fish and catch us dinner.
We got to the campsite at Elk Rock at about 4pm, and this was what greeted us at the entrance:
So they just turned off the electricity and water. Two days ago. We looked online for other parks that might still have their facilities turned on, or at least didn't explicitly say on their websites that they had been turned off, but the only ones we could find were reservation-only and all of their electrified campsites were completely booked up for this weekend, and we would really like to stay through the weekend.
We drove through and checked out the Elk Rock campsites anyway, and it looked like actually, yes, there was electricity at the campsites, and drinking water from the outdoor taps. That sign was apparently referring only to the bathrooms and showers, which are in fact completely locked up, so don't know why they felt the need to specify water and electricity was off when they could just say the bathrooms were shut down.
Anyway, we found a nice RV campsite with not too many people, found we had enough cash to pay for 5 nights, shoved it into the envelope, and settled in. Spent much of the evening setting up our tent. There's a gravel strip between the power outlet and the grass, and I really wanted to set the tent up on the grass, but the 25 foot extension cord I got barely reached to the one opening the tent had to send an electrical cord to. For some reason they put this opening on the front, cause I guess they figured people like to have their tent facing towards their electrical connectors. I managed to get the tent set up just on the edge of the grass with the power cord just barely stretched over to it. I don't know why I thought 25 feet would be enough, but we're settled now. The dogs appreciate having a nice big tent as their wrestling ring.
I went on a long odyssey out into the night to get us Taco Bell for dinner, which was a 20 minute drive away. @deilann@tech.lgbt just wanted some black bean taco supremes and a veggie power bowl. I went across to Wal-Mart to get us some snacks for the evening and some firewood. They didn't have firewood, but an employee was very helpful in giving me directions to Casey's, which he wanted to make very sure I got right and didn't get lost, as it's a left out of Wal-Mart, and then a right when you get to Main Street, and I didn't know how best to explain to him that it was the year 2024 and I had Google Maps.
I came back finally after it had gotten dark with Taco Bell and some snacks and a box of Wal-Mart firewood, and @deilann@tech.lgbt discovered his tacos were not supreme (they never are), and they had put chicken in his veggie power bowl, which he found out only after taking a bite of it. He nearly threw up from this, and this wasn't helped later on when Molly pooped in the tent. He decided to live off of the Oreos and cheese curds and Halloween candy that I had brought and the dogs enjoyed his chicken. I spent the rest of the evening setting up our Starlink and convincing our dogs that this was home now.
Like and comment @TV4Fun@raphus.social