Our Summer in Holley, NY

To get used to living in our 5th wheel, we booked a seasonal site at Red Rock Ponds campground just northwest of Holley.  We moved in on May 18th and will be moving out and hitting the road on October 11th.  It has been a very eventful summer with a lot of stress.  

It started the weekend we moved in and discovered that the underbelly of our brand new 5th wheel was full of water!  I feared that we had a fresh water tank leak or some other form of plumbing leak.  We had purchased the RV through Wilkins RV and picked it up at their Bath, NY facility. Fortunately, they have another location in Churchville which is near our home, so we made an appointment for June 1 to have this water problem resolved.  After cutting into the underbelly and removing all the waterlogged insulation, their senior RV tech could not locate any leak.  In fact, there is virtually no plumbing near the waterlogged insulation.  He checked the underbelly forward where the fresh water tank and majority of the plumbing is located.  This area was bone dry and after 4-5 hours with water pressure in the plumbing, there was no sign of a leak anywhere.  The diagnosis was lack of sealing around the frame and the underbelly material near the wheel wells where water spray and/or melting snow had seeped in.  I was skeptical but had to agree there really wasn’t any other reasonable explanation.  They replaced the underbelly, taped up the cuts and filled the seams that were not well sealed from water with expanding foam to prevent it from happening again.  I did some research on road spray getting into the underbelly in this fashion and sure enough, there are stories on the internet of this very issue.  Check your seal between the frame of your RV and the underbelly to make sure there is no way water can flow into that area!

When we first booked to stay at this RV park bordering the Erie Canal last fall, we only booked for the month of June.  As the summer approached and we took delivery of our Mobile Suites RV, we decided to make our stay at Red Rock Ponds a seasonal stay.  The owners were very accomodating but we had to move to different sites a couple times.  As June came to an end, we moved from site 72 nestled among very nice seasonal neighbors to site 83 which is traditionally a weekend/short stay site.  We were in this site for July and then moved to site 68 for the remainder of the season.  Site 68 is just two sites down from our original site 72 and once again among the friendly neighbors.  The moving was not an issue and gave us practice tearing down and setting up.

Our summer got even more interesting on the evening of July 6th.  While returning from a bike ride to Albion for some ice-cream,  we were about to enter the park entrance when Amy had a mishap on her bike and managed to break her collarbone.  This put her out of commission for a large part of what was left of the summer.  It also made things difficult preparing our household items for an estate sale.  As we sit here at the end of September and 8 weeks post surgery she is doing much better, the estate sale is over and was a big success.