Escape from the nuthouse

 Educated
by Tara Westover


Wow. I didn't know what I was getting into here. The girl grew up with a manic-depressive psychopath for a father; a weak-willed but intelligent mother; and three or four older brothers who shared the general lunacy of growing up in a nuthouse. Among his many absurd paranoia, the father didn't believe in doctors or hospitals. When his kids were severely injured--or he, himself--he expected his wife to fix them up with her homeopathic home remedies. Oddly enough, they mostly survived.

This memoir is chapter after chapter of disaster, and nearly impossible to stop reading once you've started. The story of a girl growing up in a 24x7 train wreck. There is a lot of stomach-churning abuse here, meted out by an older brother who is alternately nurturing and torturing.  It's pretty sick stuff, but told in a matter-of-fact voice that lets you get through the humiliation and pain quickly.

The title, Educated, reveals how she might--possibly--escape from the insane asylum. One of her brothers goes to college, and somehow, after no formal schooling and very little home schooling, she decides to do so, too. You have to love her. She's smart, but so very ignorant. She knows nothing of the world--no history, geography, mathematics beyond simple arithmetic, literature, philosophy. Is this even possible?

When you read it, you'll see.

Lots of labels: YA + historical + fiction

 The Downstairs Girl

by Stacey Lee

Very unusual and entertaining story of a young girl living with her uncle (or some older relative) in a cellar under a newspaper office. No one knows they're there, and no one must ever know, because they are Asian in a time and place when Asians are not welcome. San Francisco, maybe?  I don't remember exactly where. The time was the turn of the century.

It's hard to tell any more without spoilers, but I'll say only that it was just scary enough to be realistic but not so much to keep it away from a younger audience. I, of course, am way out of the target audience age, but still I enjoyed it very much. The author had a clever turn of plotting and a decent facility at creating characters I really wanted to spend time with. And that says it.

Humor AND travel guide

 Florida Authentica: Your field guide to the unique, eccentric, and natural marvels of the real Sunshine State

by Ron Wiggins
    

Contains some really funny descriptions, as in hilarious. I hate to quote any because they may not be so funny out of context and that might spoil the joke for you. Here's a couple I think safe to use:

[regarding one of those magical mystery tourist traps, where balls roll uphill] If you don't believe me and Tyler, take a spirit level to Spook Hill and see for yourself. And if your spirit level tells you you're rolling backward uphill, it's lying. Have it exorcised.

[regarding an amusement park ride] "Kind of reminds me of what I had for breakfast," I said

The first half of this book describes the natural areas. Parks, swamps, and marshes. Absolutely great for my purposes, which is to find places to go. I can only hope I enjoy them as much as he did. The second half goes more pedestrian, with food, landmarks, and other human history attractions. Also good and also very funny, but less valuable to my research.

Gardening Roots, fall on the calendar

We're in the pause season--that interlude between summer and fall when the grass is still green, the leaves are still on the trees, and the cooler air lends an expectation of winter. It feels chilly, but it really isn't.

My garden is still full of zinnias. A couple of years ago, I planted the accumulation of zinnia seed packets we had in the stash. Most were three years old at the time, but they didn't care--they came up in droves. Then reseeded themselves and took over my tomato and root vegetable beds. I've collected a lot of seeds and will collect more before the frost knocks them down, and next year I'll replant them somewhere else. They're beautiful and they attract tons of butterflies, but they're preventing me from getting my fall cleanup work done. It's the old "flower vs. weed" question.

 

and they are much beloved

My fall garden, what little there is --

Turnip greens

 In the very back is a bit of Speckled Bibb lettuce. Of all the lettuce seed I planted, that may be all I get.

 Probably Daikon radishes

And no picture, but a bunch of green onions coming up where the onions I planted last year failed to thrive. I guess they were waiting for colder weather?

Reading #2 first in the Zoe Chambers Mysteries

Lost Legacy
by Annette Dashofy
    

I sort-of liked this. In many ways, I liked it very much--the lead character, her many friends and people in the small town she occupies, her occupation as an EMT and the adventure that goes along with it.  So I think I'll read another one.

What I didn't like was related to a basic fear of mine--I am leery mysteries where the central plot is the lead character's origin story. After finding out the story of their father or their mother's death, where is there to go? It seems like this is akin to the kiss of death that ensues when the romantic rivals finally tie the knot--where does the story go from there? I've started (and quit on) several mystery series where the author wastes her shot in the first couple of books and then fails to make the transition into other plot lines. Will this be yet another?

Will let you know.

Great, dependably

 Hid From Our Eyes

by Julia Spencer-Fleming


After a couple of blips in the earlier volumes, this series continues on a straight road. I'm now up to #9--no more for now--and they've always been good; always different; always with a little something extra to make your brain work. The ongoing saga of Hadley and Kevin goes on (should I say that?). Claire is struggling mightily with motherhood. And an unexpected figure from the past throws a monkey-wrench in the whole works.

But none of that is anything to do with the mystery. It involves a mysterious corpse of a young woman with no apparent cause of death. Which exactly replicates an unsolved case from the 1970s, when Russ was newly back from Vietnam and at loose ends trying to figure out what to do with his life. And another one from the 1950s. Huh?

I maybe didn't find it as thrilling as some of the others, but it was so very impossible to put down that I rushed through the audiobook at every opportunity. Mindfulness may be great when you're washing dishes or folding laundry, but an audiobook is better.

Some mysterious things

 Among the Mad
by Jacqueline Winspear

Even a not-so-great Maisie Dobbs mystery is better than most others, and this is no exception. She is pulled in by the police (Scotland Yard?) to provide insights on the motives of a war-scarred serial killer. Or rather, she's pulled in by the killer himself, in a letter of ultimatum.

A Legacy of Murder
by Connie Berry

Okay, well. In this case a second trial didn't make up my mind--I'm still undecided about this series.

I guess I like it...so long as the library has it. I certainly don't like it well enough to pay money for it.

Here's the deal: the "detective" is an antiques dealer in America somewhere. In the first book she goes to England to help out a sister-in-law from her first marriage and ends up embroiled in the woman's murder. And she falls in love with a police detective.  But she has to go back to the states and carry on a long distance relationship.

In this one she goes to England again to visit her daughter. And murder most foul keeps her busy again.

And it looks like the next one will be set in England, too.  Or is it Scotland?  Sorry I get confused--I am by no means an anglophile of any sort. And thus, that makes strike 1 for me.

Strike 2 is the absolute bland boringness of the relationship. Which is good, in a way--I'm spared any angst of the "does he/doesn't he?" nature. Strike 3 is--well, there's isn't a strike 3 yet. I like everything else about the books and I really, really like the antique detection and the elderly antique dealer she works with to search for the missing item which will explain the whole murder thingy. That stuff is way cool.

Great-ish travel adventure. Dated a bit.

 Old Glory
An American Voyage (My copy had this subtitle)

by Jonathan Raban

I bought this book many years ago and somehow never got around to reading it. His writing is masterful, evocative, and calm--

A factory went by; an empty dock; a lone man with a paintbrush on the deck of a tug, who looked up for a moment from his work and waved; then summer-dusty trees, massed and entangled on a shore of powdery sand. Rising fish left circles on the water here, and the current squeezed them into narrow ovals, before they faded into the scratched wax polish of the top of the river. It was lovely to be afloat at last, part of the drift of things.

But when he gets into the eddys and boils of the river below Wisconsin, his struggles with the river fill me with sick fear and a desire to never, ever venture out on a boat in a river. We camped by the Red River in Louisiana once, and the list of warnings on the "Boaters Take Caution" sign was shudder-worthy.

Mr. Raban took his journey down the Mississippi in the late 70s, a time when the strident excitement of the hippie era was being replaced with the dull "me first/make money" era of the eighties. Many of the people he met were existing without ambition in a meaningless, foggy swamp of sameness. Not the river, though--it was a monster and a bully and had places to go for sure. And along he went, respectful of its moods and patient to learn all it could teach him. Strange guy.

I liked him but I didn't love him, if you know what I mean. I enjoyed going along on his journey, very much, but I didn't feel he had anything to teach me. He didn't seem to have any interest in natural history and he seldom described the many animals or birds he must have encountered. Strange.

A maybe (not) series

 Black Velvet (The Erin O'Reilly Mysteries #1)
by Steven Henry

I finished this book automatically thinking I'd put the next one on my list, but...maybe not. It was not memorable. Oh, the action was good and the mystery okay, but there just wasn't anything in it that dug at the heart and demanded more.  It seemed like a good author who was writing in the "female detective with police dog" genre because that was trendy, not because it was special to him in any way.

When a man writes a woman lead character--or the reverse--he or she needs to have the book carefully reviewed by an opposite sex-er for realism. And while I can't put a single finger on a scene where it was glaring obvious that "a man wrote this", it still seemed that way. "Erin was furious. She wanted to hit something." Hmmm. Little things, like taking risks women don't typically take. But maybe I'm being oversensitive.

I see that he's written thirteen of these, so obviously other people don't have that objection. Or if they do, they don't care.

I might try one more.

Bad recipe; great book

Recipe Trials and Tribulations
Tofu with Crab Sauce by norecipes
 

Marc of norecipes.com made this sound gorgeous:
                      a warm cube of silky smooth tofu enveloped by a velvety crab sauce
It was yucky.

I love tofu, I love crab, and I love a dashi-based sauce. But this was just bland and fishy-tasting. My dashi was a little strong--I'll dial back the shark flakes next time. But it wasn't all that bad--I'll use the rest of it tomorrow. So I don't know why the tofu was such a disappointment.

Birding Without Borders
by Noah Strycker

Great story of a birder's big year--really big year. his goal was to break the world record of 4300 species in a single year and not break the bank doing it. Enlisting the help of hundreds of local experts, enthusiasts and outdoors nutcases, he hopped around a lot of countries and saw a bucketload of birds. Just reading his species list at the end is enough to make your mouth water. Wow.

The writing is perfect. Not too long, not a simple "did this, went there, saw that" record. He picked out a lot of amusing, scary or exciting episodes and told them in amusing, scary and exciting detail. And a few spaces for personal reflection--why am I doing this? Where am I going after this? How will I ever stop?

And this quote,
So what does a list measure, if not expertise or talent? Some argue that a list is only a metric of the depth of one's pockets and the free time to empty them. Those critics have a point, but I think a list is grander than that: besides reflecting how many places a person has traveled, it measures the desire to see those places and those birds firsthand. A list, in other words, is a personal account of dreams and memories. It conveys poetry and passion and inspiration.

This book, too, is a lot more than birding. He touches a little--just a little--on human problems in the countries he visits. But not so much you get distracted from the journey. He doesn't appear to be the sort of person who gets too hung up on problems, once they're conquered. I think somewhere in the book he gives advice--if a problem can be made to go away with $20, do it.

Of course a book like this has to touch on ecological issues. Toward the end he travels to see a rare oil in, of all places, a palm oil plantation. Little did I know,
Palm oil, squeezed from nuts produced on squat trees, is used in half of all supermarket products -- including lipstick, soap, chocolate, instant noodles, bread, detergent, and ice cream-- and labeled under a host of names, such as vegetable oil, vegetable fat, glyceryl, and Elaeis guineensis (the plant's scientific name). ... The stuff is ubiquitous -- it's even an ingredient in biofuels -- but nearly invisible.
yet,
Oil palm plantations, widely regarded as one of the world's worse environmental scourges...

So that adds another obscure and difficult to detect item to my list of stuff to avoid. Blast it all!

YA but good this time

 Furia
by Yamile Saied Méndez
Oh wow oh wow. Loved it, and can't tell why without spilling the ending all over the floor. She did cut the ending a little short--the last chapter covered a lot of time quickly --but that was okay by me. The chapters that led up to it were not cut short, and they were intense.

Set in Argentina (I think), it tells of a woman on the edge of adulthood, living in a machismo-driven culture with a loving but ineffectual mother, a brother who is expected to be a football star but isn't, and an over controlling father with a vile temper. The threat of violence threads through this book like an evil worm working its way to the heart.  Camila lives and breathes to play football but gets to face distractions in the way of an old childhood friend now turned star player. Will she give up her dreams for a safe escape from her abusive home?

Smashing! Whacky book about a lot of nutty and wonderful people

 The Audacity of Sara Grayson

by Joani Elliott

As much as I loved this book, I got very angry at it many times. Points:
(a) the characters (adults) all persist in telling other characters (also adults) how to live their lives.  I kept hollering, "Just shut up, will you? Quit butting in and and let this person make up their own stupid choices!

(b) the three main characters all persist in jumping to conclusions based on insufficient evidence and then making themselves miserable for days and weeks agonizing over those incorrect conclusions. Yes, I know that's the whole point of fiction, and yes, I know we all do that. But in this case, based on the evidence the author has presented, I disagree strongly with their conclusions. I'm not finished yet, so we'll see who is right.

(c) too much angst for a grown woman. If this were a YA novel, I'd roll my eyes and skip forward. but I don't expect to have to do that in a novel for grownups.

Still loved it.

Gardening In My Roots, nearly fall

This is from 9/28, two weeks ago, with an update

Planted garlic last Tuesday. I hope it wasn't too early. Or too deep, or too shallow, or too late, or or or. Gardening is like that. But the weather is supposed to moderate, starting tomorrow with a chance of rain (not a good chance, so I'm watering right now), and with highs staying in the low 80s for the rest of the week. Should be perfect.

I've a lot of radishes up, and something else I don't know what is. I'm hoping it's a variety of lettuce, because it's right where I put the "wild garden" lettuce seeds at. But that mix might contain radishes too, or arugula, so who knows?  In any event, I hope it's edible!

Since I've never successfully grown a fall garden, I've been watering lightly every day since I put the seeds in. (Sep 22, almost a week ago) I planted turnips, beets, radishes, daikon radishes, and the lettuce mix.  Oh, and I think I put in a couple of rows of collards.  That would be great--to grow collards!  I love them, but for some reason my mother did not. I remember way back in the day when the grocery story would get in big (seasonally) fresh stores of turnip, collard, and mustard greens.  She'd pick out handfuls of turnip greens and stuff them in a bag, to buy, and often she'd throw in a handful of mustard greens. "For spice".  

I should try that sometime.

Update 10/11: the turnips and radishes are up; the beets came up but some creature dug into the bed and disappeared them. And a whole lot of weeds are up. Sigh.

A YA novel with imagination

 What I Carry
by Jennifer Longo

As usual, this YA novel was written by an older person. But in this case it was written by an adoptive mother tring to explain what it was like for her daughter's experiences in foster care. I'm thinking she did a great job. Yeah, maybe her lead character was a little unrealistic at times, like she'd crammed a lot of characters into one, but it was almost believable.

She'd developed a coping strategy for foster care--don't unpack your suitcase, don't get attached, don't make trouble. And when you eventually age out, be prepared for a rocky road--with no help, no college and no place to live, you're going to be working a lot of entry level jobs to stay off the street.

If nothing else--and don't get me wrong, she wrote a really good and non-preachy book here--this book makes one important point. Don't adopt because you want a kid. it's not about you. Parenting isn't either--don't have a kid just because you want to have one. You don't have a kid--you birth a kid, you feed, teach, train it,you're stuck with it for the rest of your life, but you never really have it. At best, you're entitled to the privilege of watching it grow up until eventually, it realize that it has itself. And then you no longer have it anymore, and that's the point.

A Did-Not-Finish and another great mystery

 Gathering Moss
A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses
by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I didn't finish enough of this book to write a review of it. Despite every good thing it appears to contain, plus more than decent writing, I just couldn't find myself enjoying it. Sorry to give up--will not taint the ratings of other people who finished it.

 Birds of a Feather


by Jacqueline Winspear

Another great Maisie Dobbs mystery!  The plot is pretty thick in this one--deaths of three apparently unrelated young women, police arrest a guy whom Maisie is pretty sure didn't do it, and where do the feathers fit in?  But plot aside, it's the characters who make the story. She does a pretty good job with the atmosphere, too--time and place and all the little tidbits that make it real.

Mammoth in Colorado Days 10 and 11

 Wednesday 15 September 2021

Lake Trinidad State Park to Caprock Canyons State Park
Planned 5:24
Actual 5:49
Lost an hour on the time zone change at the Texas border

Ready for a long drive? We weren't. A bolt in the right-side slideout broke; luckily Ed had a bolt that would replace it, but any sort of repair like that takes longer than you hope. It probably added a half-hour to our departure time. and our planned trip was over five hours.

But no matter, we were lucky to be leaving at all! We chose the shortest route with the fastest Google Maps time, which was directly over Raton pass and down the hills of  New Mexico. We headed east on highway 84, the same one that had taken us to the volcano on the day before. I read the pamphlet during the drive--it appears that most of the pointy things on the plains there were also extinct volcanos, 55,000 to 62,000 years old.  The large volcanic field surrounding the monument contains at least 100 recognizable volcanoes.

There was a goodly number of Pronghorn Antelope roaming the fields by the road.  Good to see those fellows, survivors from a dark and dangerous time in north America's history. They evolved to outrun and outwit dire wolves, the short-faced bear, the North American lion, jaguars, hyenas, and cheetahs, all contemporaries of the lowly pronghorn.

I wonder if we should plan the rest of our RV lives to be a quest to see all of the mammals of North America?  Those thoughts and many other random ones coursed through my brain on the very long drive. We lost an hour, too, when we crossed over the Texas state line. 

The drive mostly looked like this:

Shortly after five o'clock we drove into Caprock Canyon state park. The office was closed, but they had clearly printed instructions on the self-pay station, so I duly filled out the form, dropped it in the box and stuck the white copy on my windshield. Then we unhooked the Jeep and had to dodge a herd of bison on the road to get to the campsites. 

Just as I remembered--this place is gorgeous to the max! I took Molly for a walk down to the prairie dog town and before we even got there, I noticed that two of the heads poking up from the holes weren't prairie dogs at all.
Burrowing owls!

While I was watching, a coyote ambled across the other side of the town.

Thursday day 11
The drive home was boring and served only to (a) get us home, and (b) confirm my notion that I should never take the highway 380 route from Denton again. Too many stoplights! Google maps says it's fifteen minutes faster to go all the way down 35-E to US-121 and back up, and in this case I believe it is correct. But we made it. Home.

Notes:
1. Quit being afraid--go ahead and schedule trips in the mountains. The TALL mountains. The RV can do it (with a little TLC).
2. At a park like Trinidad, with lots of good trails, spend more time moseying around looking for birds. Even if that means leaving the dogs behind. Sorry.

Mammoth in Colorado Day 9

 Tuesday 14 September 2021

After pancakes, we headed out to see Cimmaron Canyon State Park. But for reasons unknown, my google maps app decided that I-25 was not contiguous through the northern part of new Mexico, and it insisted we detour off on US-84 far to the east, then circle back. It made no sense, but I believed it.  (I even tried putting a point on the route to force it to take the shorter way, but that added 45 minutes to the trip.)

Well, it was wrong. In a lucky way, though. As we were headed aimlessly due east on 84, passing private, ranch roads that Google kept telling us to turn off on, I noticed a sign for Capulin Volcano National Monument, 20 miles. I looked up people's reviews and they were good--you could drive your car all the way to the top of the extinct volcano. So what the heck, we did.

It was indeed too cool for words, however, if I had not been able to get in for free with my Lifetime Senior Access Pass then I probably wouldn't have thought it worth the $20 entrance fee. But it was free and we loved it.

some pictures from the top

Another volcano in the distance

Looking down from the rim

The drive to the top, hugging the edge of a narrow, two-lane road with no guard rail until you got very near the top, was scary. I opened my eyes a couple of times to look down, but they didn't stay open very long.  But when we were safely at the top, standing on our own two feet on very solid ground, it was a fantastic view.

Back on the highway, I ignored google maps and just stayed on 84 West, and after a long drive through short-grass prairie sprinkled with cholla, we passed through the town of Cimarron and started climbing into the canyon.

The campgrounds were nice, but tiny and not in the really cool part of the canyon. The canyon walls themself were tremendous.  The river ran noisily alongside the road, and now that I think of it, it might have been a great place to camp where wildlife were narrowed into a space alongside the water. No matter. It was out of the question--they didn't accommodate RVs as large as ours. According to the reservations page, it was for small trailers only.

Pronghorn antelope!

We returned by about 3:50, so I loaded my camera in the backpack and took Molly's leash. I was determined to see some birds before the trip was over.

Off we went, up a hiking trail.  Actually we were on the campground spur to get to the hiking trail, a one-mile self-guided loop.  The campground spur to the loop and the first part of it were rugged and did a lot of climbing.  we saw a couple of really cool birds at first, but they evaded my lenses.  

Looking down on Mammoth (second from the right)

Lake Trinidad

The loop trail was numbered, 1-15 or so. We got up to number 10 when I really wanted to quit--a thunderstorm was looming to the north. I pulled up the trail map on my phone and confirmed that it really was a circle, and only a 1-mile circle. We'd already been walking for about thirty minutes, so most likely we were near the end. And we were.

We returned, birdless, about a half hour before the rains came.

Mammoth in Colorado Day 8

 Monday 9/13

Today was going to be a lazy one. Just take a drive up highway 12, the scenic "Highway of Legends." I'm not sure who named it that or why, but it was printed on the signs and labeled on the map.

On the way we passed the turnoff to the Wildlife Watching area, so we drove down a gravel road to reach it.  The road ended at a big sheltered display with no useful information at all--Colorado doesn't seem to spend too much on putting information on their displays, just plenty of quotations about nature. I wanted to know what animals had been sighted there, but all we  had were a couple of panels of wildflowers and a big one in the middle with some boring quotations.

We walked along the path to the bird/wildlife watching blinds, but Zack being what he is (old and slow), we didn't get far before he had to be carried. And it was getting hot by then--it was after ten o'clock.  

It was a very beautiful walk, but unpleasant with Zack and all the stickers on the ground. I saw a couple of small falcons on the rocks above the creek, a few sparrows, some lizards, and absolutely nothing else. A couple of plats of very interesting scat could easily have been bear, though. My guess would be about a week old.





We went on with the drive and soon found ourselves heading high in the mountains, headed to a memorial wildflower meadow as a destination. It was high up and very beautiful. Almost no people anywhere up there, either. Nice place to camp.

I'd pictured the mountains out here as all snow-capped peaks, but these are older, rounder, and don't even have a tree line. Still the scale is vast beyond imagination.

Here is a magpie. It's the same bird in both shots--apparently the blue only shows when the sun hits it in a certain direction.

Mammoth in Colorado Day 7

 Sunday 9/12/2021

We finally did something I've been planning to do ever since we started this RV thing--get up, drink a quick coffee, and head out to a wildlife area. We didn't make it there before sunrise, but it wasn't all that late. Other than the mule deer, which were all over the farmed fields on the road out of the park, we only saw a muskrat swimming in the Piedras. But that's better than nothing! Besides, I don't think I've ever seen a muskrat before. I didn't get a picture--right after I saw him and called Ed over, the varmint disappeared and didn't return. I don't think he saw or heard us--we were way far away, up on the bridge. I think he just went to bed.

After that, moving day.
Navajo Lake State Park to Trinidad Lake State Park
planned time: about 4 hours
Actual time: unknown -- I didn't write it down until after the "tank filling" episode
We left at 10:17 and arrived at our site at about 4:44 but a lot of that was wasted.
quick fillup in Alamosa

We started off going north and crossing the mountain ridge. It was really high and a little scary, but Ed and Mammoth took it easy. At the bottom we were puzzled to encounter a "chain area", which was apparently a pull off spot where people could put on their tire chains. Then on up and up and up. Over the top (I think) we went through a snow shed--a short, concrete structure for keeping impending avalanches from covering the road. 

Shortly after that we went through a tunnel--Wolf Creek Pass Tunnel at 10,800 feet--and then we were down, down, down in the plains.

Several little towns were scattered over the high plain, so I got ot the phone and started looking for a truck stop, for refueling. Soon I discovered that most of what were labeled truck stops on the map were not what I wold call suitable places for refueling a large truck, let alone a smallish motor home.

There was a big travel stop in Alamosa which actually had a couple of truck pumps over to the side. We gassed up quickly and were on the road.

 

 After the long valley, we had to make a jump over the mountains again to get to I-25, the major north-south highway between Denver and Santa Fe. Those mountains were challenging, too, but not as exciting. Just over the top Ed pulled off at a scenic overlook so we could walk and water the dogs. They weren't impressed with the scenery but the water was greatly appreciated.

Snow blocks?

And from there a boring drive down the Interstate to Trinidad and the Trinidad Lake State Park. Not so great. It was very, very crowded, and the interior roads narrow and not very well labeled.

The big unknown factor of this part of the trip was water. We knew that there were no water hookups at the campsites, but there were water take-on points marked here and there on the map. About four of them for about 60 campsites. We stopped at the first one and found that the faucet threads were so screwed up that if we'd tried to take on water we'd have spewed out more gallons than we put into the tanks.

So on the the next one, which was better. Except that it had a reducer installed at the outlet which made the water flow very very slowly. We waited and waited and waited, but our tank wasn't filling. At some point Ed tinkered with the various valves and contraptions in the utility compartment (is that what they call it, where you hook up input hoses and water hoses?), and then the water quit flowing in at all. I could tell by feeling the hose that no water was moving at all.

We wasted another ten minutes or so before I went and insisted to Ed that there was no water flowing, so he tinkered with the valves some more. Yahoo! Water began to flow into the tank. Once that happened, it only took five minutes.

All in all, we must have sat there with the engine idling for thirty minutes trying to fill up the darn fresh water tank. And even then the gauge only showed 2/3 full.

No matter, we now had our water and we went on to the site. It wasn't great. It was so very unlevel that our front tires were ten inches off the ground, higher on one side that the other. The surface was gravel; the picnic table new but had no cover--most of them don't--and there are grass burs all in the short, dry grasses of the camp ground.

But the worst thing was all the people and all the dogs. Here, at least, I didn't see a single dog off leash. But it was hard to get Molly to be quiet and do her walks without passing other people's dogs ever minute.  I actually cut up the hill across an empty campsite to get ot the playground, and from there to the day use area.

There were only a couple of groups in the day use area, so once I got her to leave the pink birthday cake fragments on the pavement alone, we had a good walk.