Our Nest on Wheels: August 2016

3 Free Things to Do in Sturgeon Bay on a Rainy Day

It was so rainy today that our doormat starting floating away. So we decided to find some fun indoor sightseeing. And since we are still not quite sure whether we're on vacation or just doing regular life, we opted for our regular-life default: free.

Here are three fun things we found to do indoors, for free, in Sturgeon Bay. (This is by no means an exhaustive list; it's just what we opted to do. If you want more ideas, check out this site.)

Door County Historical Museum

Apparently the Chicago Trib once called this "the best small museum in the midwest," which seems to be kind of a theme in Sturgeon Bay (see Miller Art Museum, below). It reminds me a bit of a crazy quilt: a bunch of somewhat haphazard exhibits pieced together to make up a quaint and rather charming whole.

When we entered the museum, we found ourselves face to face with a variety of taxidermied (that would be taxidermic to my colleagues who are still obligated to follow Merriam-Webster) animals in a not-behind-glass (good luck finding that in M-W) diorama. It reminded me of a combination of the old-style dioramas in the Grand Rapids Public Museum of my youth (a few of which can still be found in Chicago's Field Museum) and the Rainforest Cafe. Those of you who lived in Grand Rapids in a certain era can also through in a mental image of the tree at Pooh's Corner Bookstore (may it rest in peace).

The entire thing--taxidermy, mural, even construction of the trees and rocks (of pourable styrofoam, because the floor isn't strong enough to hold that much real rock) is the work of one man, Mike Orthober. He continues to add birds and animals to it, actually stuffing them right in the museum for anyone to watch! Only, sadly, not today. I was sorely disappointed, but I did find a video of it on YouTube, so I've got that going for me.

To make up for my disappointment over missing the taxidermy demonstration, I talked Steve into taking my picture on one of the several fire trucks that are housed in the museum along with (I'm not making this up) a display on "Mortuary Coaches of Door County." I was unable to persuade him to be photographed in the jail cell (also in the room with the fire trucks and hearses), however.

Other exhibits include the history of the fish boil (turns out it started at the very restaurant where we enjoyed a fish boil last night), cherry farming in Door County, and--possibly my favorite--a collection of church anniversary plates. (We found this particularly meaningful because in our downsizing we had found a plate commemorating the 75th anniversary of Oakdale Park Christian Reformed Church. We couldn't quite bring ourselves to throw it away—someone might want it!—so we wrapped it in a paper bag and brought it to Oakdale Park CRC the last time we were in Grand Rapids. We told the man who came to the door—he remembered Steve from Steve's childhood, naturally—that we had something from the church, and before we opened the bag he said, "Oh—an anniversary plate?")

Popelka Trenchard Glass

We kind of rushed through the last bit of the history museum because we were eager to see the glass-blowing at the Popelka Trenchard gallery. Alas! The information we had didn't give the hours for the glass-blowing, and we had missed it. (Do you notice another theme developing?)

The gallery is totally worth a visit even without any demonstrations, though. It showcases the poured glass of artist Stephanie Trenchard—whom we met! and she was so charming!—and the blown glass of her husband, Jeremy Popelka. (At least I think he's her husband; TripAdvisor says he is. I didn't ask.)

I had never seen pieces like those Ms. Trenchard creates. She sculpts and paints objects out of glass, then encases them in more glass. A video in the gallery shows the process; it's pretty amazing. (I'm posting these photos with permission, by the way.)

The workshop where they make all these works of art (did I mention that we missed the demonstration?) is attached to the gallery, which would be very handy if one were fortunate enough to be able to combine a visit to the gallery with a viewing of a glass-blowing demonstration. But I'm over it. Totally over it.

Miller Art Museum

Don't tell the Door County Historical Museum, but the Miller Art Museum boasts this review: "the most beautiful small museum I've ever seen." Regardless, any museum that shares a building with a public library is all right in my book, and what's even better is that we didn't "just miss" the exhibit we wanted to see: "Paint the Parks," a collection of works featuring national parks in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.

In fact, not only did we not miss the exhibit; we got in on something we hadn't anticipated: a sort of art garage sale. I was sorely tempted by a box of used fountain pen nibs and three bottles of ink for only $4—maybe less, since it was the last day of the sale and "any reasonable offer will be considered"—but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't come up with a justification that would convince me, much less Steve, so we departed junk-free.

I did find out after we left that there was an entire other wing that we somehow managed to miss, though . . .

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, by Steve and Jane Vogel

Hookup Culture, RV Style

No, not that kind.

This kind.

I don't know whether this qualifies me as adventurous or just foolhardy, but I had never even been inside a motorhome when we decided to live full-time in one. Shoot—I'd never camped in anything that had running water, much less a toilet! So I had absolutely no idea about the whole mysterious process of connecting to power and sewers, and I was afraid the whole business would be somewhat daunting.

The good news is that the whole process is really pretty simple.

If you have even a rudimentary understanding of RV hookups, you don't need to read this post. But if you, like me, are a complete novice to most things motorhome, here's a quick run-down on this part of our new lifestyle.

3 Things You Can Hook Your RV Up To

(Bonus points for ending a subhead with not one, but two prepositions!)

Electricity

Electric hookups generally come in two forms: 50 amp and 30 amp. For reasons I do not yet understand, 30-amp hookups give you 30 amps of power, while 50-amp hookups give you two inputs of 50 amps each—in other words, 100 amps of power.

Here's what the electric-hookup post at our current site looks like. See how the two circular outlets in the bottom panel have different holes? The outlet on the left is for 30 amps; the one in the middle is for 50 amps. And yes, you use a different plug depending on whether you are plugging into 30 or 50 amps. The white outlet on the far right is for 20 amps, which is what you'd use if you were camping in a tent and wanted to plug in a household-type extension cord and a light.

I'm not sure, to tell you the truth, why you'd choose 30 amps instead of 50 if you had the option, but I suppose there must be trailers or RVs that can handle only 30 amps. Our RV can use either 30 or 50. On 30 amps, we can run anything requiring electricity--microwave, both air conditioners (we have two: front and back), refrigerator, lights--but not necessarily everything requiring electricity at the same time. (Cleverly, our RV understands this and shuts various things down--"sheds" them, in RV-speak—if we try to run too many at once.) On 50 amps, we can run pretty much everything all the time. This seems to be important mostly when it's hot and you want to run both AC units.

Water

Hooking an RV to water is pretty much like connecting your garden hose at home. Often the water pipe is located between two campsites and is shared, like in the photo below. We have pressure gauge on our hose, but that's not a necessity; as you can see, our neighbor does not.

Sometimes a shared water hookup can be pretty far from your site. Our two 25-foot hoses barely reached this one.

On the RV end is a "wet bay" that houses the water intake (at the left in the photo below) as well as the sewage output (on the right; more on that in the next section). That blue cylinder on the right is a water filter, and the faucets and sprayer in the middle are for outdoor cleanup (say, if things don't go well with the sewage output).

Sewer

The sewer hookup allows you to empty two holding tanks: "gray waste" from sinks and shower and "black waste" from the toilet. As you can see in the wet-bay photo, both use the same hose outlet; you pull the designated handle for the tank you want to drain. In this photo, the drain hose is not hooked up, as you probably figured out.

When you have sewage hookup at your site, you run a sewer hose (connected to the orange-tipped housing, in the photo above) to a sewer pipe in the ground on your site. Notice the hole in the bottom of the wet bay to run the hose through so that you can close the door to the wet bay.

Our hose looks like a millipede because it's up on a support that makes the flow a little smoother.

4 Kinds of RV Hookups

A campsite will generally fall into one of these hookup categories.

Full Hookup

A site with full hookup lets you connect to electricity, water, and sewer. Sometimes a full-hookup site will have only 30 amps of electricity available; sometimes 50. These are the easiest sites to be on (you'll see why in the next sections) but also generally the most expensive. Your "utilities" are included in the price of your site if you stay only a few days, but some parks will meter the electricity and charge you by your usage is you stay a month or more.

Water and Electric

If your site has only water and electric hookups, you'll need to empty your gray waste and black waste tanks at a dump station (usually located near the entrance to the camp; more about how that works in another post.) So far we've stayed at sites without sewer hookup for less than a week at a time, so we've simply stopped at the dump station on our way out at the end of our stay, which is no big deal. It would be a little less convenient to camp at a site without sewer hookup for a long period of time because our waste tanks would fill up before we were ready to leave, and we'd have to do all the stuff involved with getting the RV ready to travel (unhooking from water and electric, pulling in slides, turning off propane, etc.) just to drive over to the dump station, then do the set-up process again (rehooking to water and electric, leveling the RV, etc.) when we got back to the site.

How do you know whether you need to empty the waste tanks? This handy set of gauges:

Electric Only

A lot of state and national parks have only electric hookups. If you know in advance that you won't have water available on your site, you can fill your fresh-water holding tank in advance. When you get to your electric-only site, just flip on the water pump, and your sink, shower, and toilet will all work normally. You'll want to watch that handy set of gauges pictured above to make sure you don't use up all your stored water. And here's something we learned the hard way: water in a holding tank doesn't stay good indefinitely! More on that in another post.

No Hookups

Even with no hookups, life in a motorhome hardly qualifies as camping, because—for a limited amount of time, anyway—we can get pretty much all the electric power we need from this impressive bank of "house" batteries (as distinguished from the chassis batteries, which power the automotive functions), with help as needed from a generator.

At some point, we may add solar panels to the roof to further reduce our dependence on electric hookups and extend the amount of time we can live off the grid and still enjoy the luxury of a working refrigerator. So far, we haven't been without an electric hookup; I imagine it will be another learning experience the first time we try that!