A Voyage

After I finished the Sunday morning (yes, I know it is Tuesday) radio program, Camping in the Zone with Raymond Brody, I took a shower, once again admiring the superb design of the shower room. A big challenge for a campground owner is to keep the shower area clean, dry and pleasant to use. A way to keep water out of what should be a dry change area seems limited due to the lack of some serious contemplation of a critical camping issue, particularly for women. It is difficult to keep the floor dry when the rooms are not properly designed. It doesn’t seem like this would be a difficult to solve. After all, most household bathrooms solve this problem with a bathmat outside the bathtub, but this is an impractical solution to the campground shower.

Maybe my quest to find the perfect campground shower is due to a personal quirk. I hate stepping on a wet floor or mat with bare feet. My toes curl repulsed by the feel of a wet surface that is “suppose to be dry”. Before I step out of the tub I dry my feet to keep the mat and floor dry.

How to make a campground shower acceptable? Quite simply, keep water in the shower area and the change area stays dry. Here are some suggestions.

1. Aim the shower head away from the doorway. Most heads face the door or are on the side to the opening. Even with a shower curtain (there is another issue) water will get into the change area because…
   
2. Put the shower curtain behind the door way, not in the door way. This way when the curtain is drawn, the door is completely covered.
   
3. Use cloth shower curtains, not vinyl and fit it to size. Cloth will dry and can be washed. Vinyl tears, mildews and can get so brittle and stiff. After a while, it is like putting up a board to keep water out.
   
4. Make a tall step into the shower area. Okay doesn’t work for the disabled individual, but for all others…
   
5. Despite the growing number of fat people (did I just insult more people?), keep the doorway narrow.
   
6. Have a drain for each individual shower. None of this common drain stuff which means water has to run somewhere.

How to take a shower to the next level:

1. Have plenty of hooks, towel bars (a true rarity) and shelves. It is scientifically impossible to hang a clean set of clothes, dirty clothes and a towel on one hook. Einstein would agree.
   
2. Provide a place inside the shower to put shampoo, soap bottle and razor. Usually a small soap dish is sloped so steeply a gecko could not manage to stay on the surface let alone a bar of soap. And once soap hits the floor in a public shower – forget about it. (Why don’t people use liquid soap?)
   
3. Have plenty of overhead space and lighting. Overhead space for ventilation and lighting so cleaning people can see what they are cleaning.
   
4. Building material should be tile with dark grout. Cement so sucks. It is cold, clammy, and feels creepy when wet.
   
5. Hang real mirrors not shiny metal mirrors which is like looking at your reflection on a tin can.
   
6. Plenty of instantaneous hot water on cold mornings.
   
7. Space Heaters. The ultimate after Labor Day above the Mason-Dixon Line.
   

Leaks
Raymond warned me to be sure to get those leaks fixed, but he wasn’t confident that silicone would do the trick. I picked the old dried out caulk from around the top of the window and then applied a nice bead of silicone across the top. This was a tricky operation as I did not have a ladder and I certainly am not tall enough to reach the top of the window. Fortunately, I was able to drive the RV next to a log pole where a water faucet was attached and was able to stand on the six inch platform. Probably not the safest way to gain the height needed, but it did the trick even if I had to relocate the RV twice because I could not reach the entire length of the window.

Then I crawled up on the roof and sealed the vent with silicone. Since the RV is twenty years old the old caulk is dry and brittle. I flicked away the loose stuff and applied the silicone, but I told dad that I think we should remove all the old caulk and put new. Will see if this does the job, if not I’ll headed to Home Depot.

Cape May Ferry

I boarded the Cape May Ferry to Lewes, Delaware. It was a short 70-minute ride on the Delaware, a fast moving ferry that can carry 100 cars and 800 people. This was so not the Micro Glory, the passenger supply ship that floats between the islands of Micronesia.

I was directed to parked the RV in the middle of the ship. Once I secured the Rig I went topside to check out the ship. The upper decks had a restaurant, gift shop, two bars and lounge. Plenty of seating with red velour covered cushions lined the areas near the clean windows. Smaller tables for four filled the center of the dining room area. Satellite TV featured an Eagles football game. I bought a pretzel and found a window seat.

Nothing about the trip was like the Micro Glory, a rusty tub of a boat that carries pigs, chickens, gasoline, building supplies, rice, copra and people from the main island of Pohnpei to the outer islands in the Western Pacific. Outside of the few dignitaries who secure the eight cabins onboard where five or more people might be crammed into a room that accommodates two, everyone else stakes out deck space with their grass mats and buckets of white rice and cooked breadfruit or bananas. The entire voyage is spent sleeping, socializing and lounging on the decks void of chairs except for any carried onboard by the passengers. The passengers share a minimal number of unisex bathrooms, stark rusty metal rooms with nothing more than the head and sink. By the end of the trip all the toilet paper is gone, the floors are soaked with water, and the toilets cease working. This is standard ocean travel; this is how it is done and this is how it is.

Back on the Delaware, I found a bench on the top deck, clean, white and no one else sitting on it. It was in the sun and I laid down to rest in the warm sun. I never fell asleep, but drifted in that state of in between – aware I was on the Delaware, feeling the sea, listening to the drone of the engines and thinking about the Western Pacific, a place I once was. Honest to God, I miss being on the ocean. Sick, sick, sick…