Let the Camping Season Begin

For me and many other Canadians Victoria Day weekend (around May 24) always marks the official opening of the camping season. For many of you in the USA the Memorial weekend marks the same occasion.

This year we had an unusually warm long weekend here in Ontario, with temperatures reaching 28 Celsius. That is very unusual. Stranger yet I hear that some campgrounds in California are still closed because of snow!

Anyway, we really enjoyed our time, especially my son Mark, who went to the beach with his little friend Benjamin. Kids stayed in the shallow water for hours, since the water was as warm as soup. It was a perfect day and I just couldn’t remember too many summer days just as beautiful.

For me and my husband, on the other hand, it was a working weekend and many of you who are owners of trailers would know what I mean: we had an important job of de-winterizing. Just as winterizing is an important task, so is starting a new season.  In my case it included spring cleaning.  I admit that I a perfectionist, so I cleaned all the cupboards out, organized content of all shelves and wiped the walls and furniture. I probably wouldn’t do all this in my house, but this is a different case. Why? The simple answer is mice and bugs.

It is easy to assume that both visited my trailer while I was away. We actually found one mouse in a trap and quite a bit of droppings around (but not in the kitchen cupboards).  What we learned last year was not to leave any dishes or cutlery in the drawers, but to move it to the higher shelves where the mice cannot reach. But I washed all the contents anyway, just in case.

The strange thing was that all the poison pellets that we left for the mice on a plate in the kitchen  were gone, but we did not find any dead mice laying around (except for the one in the mouse trap). I had a funny feeling about it, but I didn’t say anything. And as we cleaned and vacuumed the trailer nothing seemed suspicious. Then I had a closer look at the bed. It looked untouched with clean sheets, just as we left it. But when I opened the covers I found a stash of pellets and some droppings right in the middle, under all the blankets. What were the mice doing? Playing house in my bed and preparing the supplies for the winter months? Who knows, but now I also had to change all the sheets. I took advantage of the weather to air out all the blankets and pillows outside.

Unfortunately mice are a big problem for many trailer owners and cleaning all the mess is not fun. It takes a lot of time and effort, so it is better to just assume that mice will come in and put everything away as high up as possible or take it home with you.

Another part of de-winterizing is flushing the pipes. The pink antifreeze runs and runs from the faucets and the water foams and smells funny for a long time. The hot water tank is the real culprit and after two days of flushing the water was still not good for consumption. I like my water clean and I would not even wash my dishes in the pinky foam. That left me with an old fashioned method of doing the dishes: outside with cold water in a basin. The weather was too nice to complain.

My husband Jacek, on the other hand, took to otdoor activities like raking the leaves on our site. That was great exercise, but 20 bags later he was exhausted as well.

What we kept telling ourselves was that once this is done for this year, it is done, and we will be able to enjoy our summer without major clean-ups like this one.

 And so at the end we finally got to enjoy the sunny beach and warm lake, the smell of the fresh fish on the BBQ, the blooming trilliums in the woods and hello’s of our friends and fellow campers. These are the real reason we love camping so much. What are your reasons?

I hope that this nice weather holds for the entire summer. Enjoy your first camping trip this year.