Woke up early after a wonderful and cool night’s sleep! So grateful for this cold front, the whole country is suffering from a heat wave, and we’re one of the first places to get relief. Finally in the right place at the right time! After breakfast we saddled up and headed out, with plans to ride as many of the trails as possible in this relatively small park. Headed out clockwise on the Campground loop, starting with crossing the road and quickly heading into some really nice deep dark woods before reaching the head of the loop. Nice trails, mostly single file dirt track, almost no mud despite the recent rain. Halfway around, we cut over to the Lousy Creek trail and onto the NN trail, which took us to a parking area with a nice view of the dam. John Creek Loop was closed, so we complete the NN trail, went back up the Lousy Creek trail to finish the Campground Loop, except we missed a turn and ended up in the Northwest Day Use Area parking lot. Then we got on some nice but steep trails that I discovered later weren’t even on the map and got turned around somehow. Confused by the map, we headed up the road, thinking it would lead us back toward the campground, but when we started seeing private mailboxes, we realized we had gone wrong somewhere. Headed back to the parking lot, where we asked a couple of people for help, one had no idea, a horse guy was able to get us back on track. As we were stopped at the creek that runs by there, there were a couple of ladies on their horses bareback in the river, washing them down, and then a tractor pulling a hay wagon full of city kids came by, and I let them pet Apollo for a few minutes, he was wonderful with the kids. He always loves attention! What a ham! We took an apple and rest break for a bit, then finally getting back on track again, and when we came to the intersection we missed, it was easy to see how we missed it, as it cut back sharply from the trail with minimal markings. No matter, we wanted to try to ride as many trails as we could, right? We arrived back at camp having done every trail (and then some) except the Prairie Loop, which was essentially just a open field anyway, just a half mile of looping around there wouldn’t have added much to our already very enjoyable ride. We were out about four hours in all, a very nice ride! We actually ran into several groups of other riders, and there were several trailers in the Day Use parking lot, so obviously it’s a pretty popular place for the locals, even if it’s not that extensive. When we got back, we decided to jump in the shower for a quick rinse off, and, unexpectedly ran out of water. We had recently had problems with our water tank, i.e. we would fill it up and it would get empty really fast, and we had just figured out that for some reason, it seems the overflow on the tank has a hose inside the tank, rather than just out of the top or side of the tank, so when we fill it up, it sometimes starts a siphoning effect, which then drains a lot of water out of the tank. We’d had the problem a couple of times before, though not to this degree! I mean, we had filled it up when we arrived on Thursday, and there’s no way we could have gone through 85 gallons of water, even though I did do one load of laundry! Anyway, we ended up having to move the RV back down to the pump house and fill it up again, being much more observant when it started to overflow and what we had to do to stop it. We’ve now figured out a system we think we can try to prevent it from happening again, but it will require the purchase of a cheap hose we can cut up and use to clamp to the overflow pipe and then raise the other end above the level of the tank, thus stopping that siphon effect. What a dumb design! I don’t know what they’re teaching in engineering schools these days, but it sure seems like they’re missing obvious stuff, like venting and overflows and siphoning! Anyway, at last we settled down for the evening confident we’ll have enough water to last at least one more day!
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