This is a quicky post. We just made it home from Texas – our winter snowbird. We were making a mad dash from just north of Dallas to central Illinois. We did 10 hours the first day and were looking for a place to park for the night somewhere south of St Louis. Walmarts in the area looked sketchy. There were some small private parks but those are often hit and miss, and I didn’t like making a reservation, then settling for a pretty sketchy spot or having to bail and look for another park. I came across RVSelfPark.com
I had seen a story some time back about this place, and the web pages looked good – so we decided to try it. The web said there were lots of open spaces, so we didn’t bother with a reservation until we got there. We picked a site – perfectly level, which was good because our main slide and levelers refused to work. I reserved the spot we pulled into, paid and moments later our light turned green, and power was available. The lot was well lit and we are surrounded by security cameras. Each site has full hookups, though all we needed was power. There were two small houses at the top of the hill that I assumed were related (someone to monitor the camp).
A standard site was $39 a night plus tax. Some might consider that a bit pricey, but for a no issues, no hassles site close to the interstate, after a LONG day on the road, we thought that was a bargain.
We aren’t connected to them in any way, just want to point out that if you are trucking down I-44, toward Sullivan, MO and it’s too late to go through St Louis – try them out!
This blog is sort of about Dish…. But let me back up.
We are in our final week+ before hitting the road again. We’ve been in this park for several months. When we came here (again), we picked a spot that was too shaded and under a pine tree. After a few days, a nice spot on top of the hill opened – that also had a nice deck someone had left. We moved up there without much thought of the kind of trees we were going to be under. We would have shade about half the day and they weren’t pine. That was as much as we thought about it.
Well a week later, during quite a Central Illinois thunderstorm, a 2 inch branch fell – but I think it slowed its fall by hitting other branches on the way down. I searched carefully, but found no damage.
Branch after it hit the roof and fell off.
But, several times a day !!THUD!! or poc, poc, poc, poc. One end of the RV was under a 40 foot tall walnut tree and the other end an equally tall oak. The squirrels would go up in the oak tree and eat acorns and dump the bits onto the roof and the walnuts, I presume, would fall on their own, several times a day and of course, without warning. But, the site was nice so we stayed.
Then, one night/early morning: 3:30 am – nock, nock, nock, nock, nock, nock, nock, nock! What? It sounded like knuckles wrapping on the front door as fast and as frantically as someone could knock. We jumped out of bed, turned on outside lights – and there was no one.
Ok, we’ve heard of people doing that for kicks, but not in this RV park. Yet, we are in the middle of town, so who knows. The next day we put out our motion detector lights, and the next night – nothing.
Third night: at 3:40 nock, nock, nock, nock, space, nock, nock, nock, nock! We jumped up – saw no one and none of our motion lights had been set off. What? So, we lay in bed till our normal time to get up thinking about all the possibilities – too loud for a squirrel, wrong time of day for a bird. Why would a person be targeting us? No idea made any sense. I couldn’t think of anything in the RV that would pseudo-randomly start making that noise ever, let alone at that time of night.
It turned out that I had planned to install an Easy Start in the front air conditioner and it came to the top of my to-do list that afternoon. I grabbed my tools, went up to the roof and found this:
Hole in one!
Walnut in the Dish!
Apparently, a walnut falling 30 feet broke right through the dish dome. It was sitting in the bottom. It didn’t affect how the dish worked – we had been using it every day without a problem. But the antenna must have chosen to do some sort of diagnostic calisthenics in the middle of the night and the walnut was certainly preventing full rotation of the dish.
Tape job….
Easy Start, installed
Well, the Easy Start install went without hitch and I had my wife toss me up some clear packing tape. I didn’t want to take a chance that duct tape would have something that might reduce the signal quality and I hoped it would only be temporary. I pulled the cover off and taped the cracks and hole from the inside, then also taped everything from the outside. Re-installed the cover, tested the air conditioner and sat down to find a new cover. Turns out the domes are available from Dish – $80 and immediate shipping. I can only hope it’s built just a little stronger. I am thinking though about some sort of protective cover in case of hail – like some thick bubble wrap shaped into a dome…. My solar panels, by the way haven’t been hurt by any of it.
I had thought about dead branches – but hadn’t seen that one when I looked. I never thought it would be the nuts that did me in.
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