Day 4 – Up at 5:40 a.m. (26 degrees and clear) and rush to the phone to check on the temperature of the house. Dang! The house is now at 43 degrees and we had set it at 55. Something has definitely gone wrong with the heating system at the house.
House temperature falling to 43 deg. by 6 a.m., followed by a rapid rise back to 55 deg. at 2 p.m. after we got the heating system fixed
Not much choice but to drive back home and see what is going on. That’s right, back home! Oh well, we’re glad this happened at our first stop which is still within reasonable driving distance.
Packed up, dumped the stinky trash, and on the road by 7:45. Called our oil delivery company along the way and arranged to have a tech meet us at the house after 1:00, which is when we expected to be home. We actually arrived home at 12:50 and called the oil company to let them know we were home and available. They still hadn’t found a tech that could come out, so we had to wait a bit. Rob looked at the oil boiler and discovered that it simply wasn’t igniting, which was a surprise, since we had never had that problem before. At least we hadn’t frozen any pipes!
In the meantime, Rob gathered some of the “non stinky” trash that we had left at home and went to the dump to get rid of it once and for all. By the time he got back the oil company had called and told us that a tech was on the way. The tech arrived at 1:45 and found that one of the igniter electrodes was loose. He quickly fixed it and had us up and running again. Thanks Harry! We figure that turning the heat down to 50 caused the boiler to sit unused for a few days causing it to cool off more than it has done before. This cooling caused the electrode to come loose.
OK, now do we stay the night in the driveway (the house is way too cold at this point for us to stay inside comfortably) and start out tomorrow? Or de we tough it out and start South again right away? We really wanted to get to our campground in North Carolina as quickly as possible so we would lose as little of the planned 7 night stay as we could. We’d been looking forward to staying somewhere warmer and this campground had 5-star reviews. So, we decided to turn around and head back South again and get as far as we could Friday. Vicki researched campgrounds while Rob drove and she came up with Timberlane Campground just off the New Jersey Turnpike (NJTP) in Southern New Jersey as a good stopping point. If we could make it that far, we could feasibly get to NC the next afternoon and only have missed one night of camping! Definitely a better scenario than we had been expecting when the heat went out! We expected to get to Timberlane by 6:30.
Of course the NJTP has its own ideas of how successful your driving experience will be. We made good time until about 5:30, when the GPS starting adding time to our expected arrival time. There was some kind of slow down between exits 4 and 5 which was adding 45 minutes to our planned arrival. It was hard to believe that there was a problem since we were going so fast at the time, but sure enough, as soon as we hit exit 5 we slowed to a crawl. And crawled and crawled. Every minute was excruciating. We were grouchy; the cats were grouchy. It seemed every time we looked at the GPS it had added 5 more minutes to our arrival time. Frustating! In the end we got to the campground at 7:45. We were beat! More than 10 hours on the road and 2 hours at home, made for a long 12 hour day.
Vicki had found us a nice pull through spot at Timberlane, so we just pulled in and didn’t even disconnect the car. Got set up enough to feed the cats and eat in about ½ hour, record time. After eating and having a little beer and wine to unwind, we finally relaxed and were reading. Sigh…
The next thing we know there is this small explosion sound and the sound of rapidly running water. Yep, the day isn’t over yet! Rob jumps up and checks our reverse osmosis drinking water filtration system, which had popped a connection. Water spraying everywhere! We get that shut off and the connection fixed. Turn off the osmosis booster pump until we can figure out what to do about it. Rob had known that there was a problem with the boster pump cutoff switch at home, but had decided that he’d deal with it later. Guess what? This is later! OK, that’s enough for both of us and we fall into bed and pass out. The high today was 44 degrees, sunny and windy.
Timberlane Campground, 117 Timberlane Road, Clarksboro, NJ, 856-423-6677. Site 3 was near the entrance, a pull-through, easy in & easy out. I believe there was only 1 other empty site. With the campground full, it was very crowded, sites close together, but since we arrived at night, all was quiet. There may have been lots of sites filled with seasonal or stored RV’s. Their advertisement claims that they are the closest campground to Philadelphia, so for a visit to Philly, this would be a good place to stay. They were also very close to the Turnpike which was nice for us under these circumstances. For a longer stay though, I don’t think we’d find it to our liking, but for a short visit, it was great.
Could you have a neighbor check in on your house for you?
Excellent question, Helen! You haven’t been to this house. Behind us there are no neighbors and on one side you can’t see their house. The other side, we only see their house in the winter when there are no leaves on the trees – ditto across the street. People around there aren’t really close to their neighbors as far as watching the house, but the kind family “next door” will be plowing our driveway for us if there’s a bigger storm so that the Oil and Propane can be delivered. Also, when the technician came out to work on the furnace, he said that in the future all we needed to do was call them and they’d come out as long as we had a way for them to get into the house (which we do). So that problem has been solved. YAAAA. It’s all a learning process.
Love, Vicki
Yes but I could have gone there, I would still be closer than Delaware :-)))) (though agreed, no one knows how reliable I can be but ask 1st!!!)… anyway I am glad Rob is such a handy man as was the case long ago… hard to go on such adventures w/o these important skills!!!