Nipples and P-Traps

If the thousand and one trips to Lowes and Giant Recreation World were enough to change the outcome of this story it wouldn’t be much of a story so buckle your seat belts cause this one is a doozy.

The first honorable mention goes out to one of our amazing sponsors Rod Rauch of Hajoca Plumbing. The shower, sink, and all the goodies came from him.

He has been an amazing friend and follower of the Gibson Girl Guides and reached out to help us dress Trudy up real nice. Our beautiful stainless steel Luxart appliances make our little mustard yellow 1960s stove start to show its age.

We called around and eventually got a plumber to come out and tackle the task. I say tackle because she really is a beast in the plumbing department. Just like a lady, she doesn’t want no stinky man messing with her pipes. But it had to be done.

The guy came over once and said he met us, I didn’t meet him, Kaitlin didn’t meet him and now calling him has become a nice game to cheer us up. I think we have called him over 20 times with no response.

This should have been a sign. We should have stopped right there, packed her up and driven her up the road to Giant Recreation World to see our good friend Elizabeth and get her fixed up nice. But no, why would we think of that?

So we called Lou, of L.N.C Plumbing, if you’re in Winter Garden and like a bit of New England attitude, Lou is your guy, him and his (incredibly attractive) sons come out and in addition to re-plumbing in under an hour they crack jokes left and right.

Lou and Jeremy— the contractor, remember him? Yeah, we demoted his babe status and have voted him off the island but thats another story— anyway, they had a bit of deal and they showed Jeremy what he had to do to get her running right then packed up and went to another job.

Well, Jeremy had done us a really nice favor, he said we didn’t have to pay him another dime because he knew we were over budget and he would be there until the end.

That was pretty much the third to last time we saw him.

He had gone and gotten another job with a company, Monday through Friday, 9-5, can’t come at all because he suddenly had a family to take care of. Right, this is the same guy who said he didn’t have kids, we are also confused but I digress.

The point is, he couldn’t come finish the plumbing. So we found Dan. An adorable, young guy from somewhere up north came to our rescue.

If you have any household plumbing Dan is your man.

But, we didn’t do our research. We threw the poor kid in with no information, the wrong parts, and after the third 9pm trip to Lowes we thought we finally had it working.

Naturally, after all of this angst and scrambling to find a plumber, we decided to take it to Giant Recreation World to make sure we did everything right.

We didn’t.

Everything we told poor Dan to do was wrong. Oops.

Chip is one of the mechanics at Giant Recreation World who actually was a friend of our electrician. He must have felt bad by making us cry over his news that Trudy would just not have running water. He told us “You are young, go have fun and enjoy your time. It's camping!'

So we did.

There are a few more stories between then and now, but we pulled up to a gorgeous camp ground in Sunset, South Carolina and we have been asked to leave because we don’t have a shower.

Even if we did, we have the wrong spout on the end so we couldn’t hook it up anyway.

NOTE TO FUTURE TRAVELERS: SELF-CONTAINED MEANS RUNNING WATER AND COOKING SUPPLIES. (We said we had a microwave but I don’t think they think that counts.)

We were parked in-between about a dozen airstreams and two renovated Grey Hound busses not nearly as cute as Trudy and they are worried that WE are the dirty hippies.

Kaitlin has decided it is no more “Nice Tater” and she will take our shit pipe and point it at their faces the next time they ask us if we are “self-contained”.

Nevertheless we packed up and ended up at the Table Rock National Park with the most adorable little site. Although we don’t have any cool Greyhound buses as our neighbors, we are enjoying the quiet outdoors with no water and plenty of wine.