So if you read my last blog, you know we had a 2 great weekends in West Virginia. I really do love the state, it’s so much reminds me of the Adirondacks. One of the 2 engineers that sits in front of my office lived on the border of West Virginia and Ohio and talks frequently about his travels and journeys and camping in West Virginia. So I’m looking forward to going back there many more times. I won’t repost the links to those videos, you’ll have to go back to the previous blog. But as usually happens after several camping trips with the trailer and the dogs I find some things that I want to change. This time we never actually cooked in the trailer. Maybe one breakfast at one of the campgrounds, but mostly we ate inside, dodging the rain, and the cool misty mosquito infested outside. So I spent some time looking for an alternative to using the propane stove inside the camper. It’s just something I’m reluctant to do, especially in the summer when it’s hot. And though we were plugged in to shore power, and the air conditioner worked fine, the blowing from the air conditioner does flicker the flame on the stove and it doesn’t work as well as it should. It works much better inside during winter when it helps warm up the trailer. The Aliner is normally a toasty beast to begin with, and cooking a little French toast or scrambled eggs does a nice job of warming it up for breakfast if it’s cold or rainy outside.

So to try to find an alternative cooking device, we researched the various multi-cookers that are cropping up in people’s RVs all over the Internet. After watching a number of YouTube videos and stopping in at some Facebook forums and some recipe websites, I decided I would take the plunge and buy the $70 COSORI ,  7 in 1 multi-cooker. I don’t have anything to compare it to, but I do think it’s a pretty nice unit. The one I have is the same one that I’ve posted on the shopping page of  THIS blog, and it is a 6 quart. I considered getting the 2 quart, but decided that might be too small for normal meals if I have a guest or 2. As most people know I live a solitary and lonely life, but I’m looking forward to having my niece come and visit, my mother and brother, and my  2 sons on occasion. That will surely make my solitary and lonely life  seem so much nicer. So I did the un-boxing video on the COSORI 6qt Multi-Cooker and may eventually do some camping and cooking recipe videos. But I have learned that my cooking style and abilities do not usually match up well with the rest of the world. I’m fairly happy warming up a can of beans or plain hotdogs. While most of the recipes for the multi-cookers have 12 to 15 ingredients and then another 7 to 10 spices and herbs to make it of wonderful gourmet meal. It doesn’t seem to me like that’s the best way to cook when you’re in a tiny RV. I did make a fantastic meal  at home where I just threw some rice and chicken legs and vegetables in it and set it for chicken and hit go and had a really good chicken dinner in 15 minutes. And since then I’ve made a really nice stew with leftover carrots, peas, potatoes, onions, garlic and some top round beef. However the 2nd night so much was left over I thought maybe I would mix it in with some rice and added some spicy rice to it and pretty much destroyed the edibility of the food. The boys did enjoy me giving them the pieces of meat that I could dig out of the rice in the garbage. More to come on the adventures of learning how to cook in a multi-cooker.

I have also been seeing a lot of questions on the forums and on Facebook and some of the videos I’ve shot about winterizing your camper. So I had to answer some questions for people and think about winterizing campers myself. While I love my Aliner, I have looked at a lot of big RVs, both class A and class C.  And one of the things that the higher end RVs usually have installed is a RV anti-freeze winterizing injection system. So I decided I was going to build one of those into my Aliner’s water system. I did the plan out and figured out what I would need to do it, and then when I went to the local Camping World to buy the bypass valve,  I saw that they already had a kit for doing what I wanted to do. So we purchased the kit and tried to do it as the kit recommended. Well if you know me very well, I’m not usually easily satisfied by “ONE KIT WORKS FOR ALL” type commercial applications. So after doing it the way they said to do it, and doing the video, I decided I wanted it more accessible and easier to work with. If you watched the video will Water System Winterizing Modification, I showed how the recommended installation left the valve buried under the water input pipe. So I built a couple of extension hoses and moved it out from under the bed and into the compartment that holds the electrical conversion box. Now in the video it shows a lot of wires and electrical connections next to where the water lines are running, and I’ve had a lot of comments and questions about the safety of that. But all those wires and connections are 12volt so they won’t be dangerous if they were submerged in water and the water won’t really hurt them unless it stays there for a long time and corrodes them. And of course any water leakage anywhere in the trailer is really bad news so, water leaking on 12volt is the least of the worries of water leakage. The shore power also comes into that area and comes in the bottom of the power converter. And that is 30amp and 120volt. But it is pretty well sealed inside the plastic box of the power converter. It’s not sealed airtight, but it is covered and protected from any water drips or water issues in that compartment. So that’s not a concern to worry about. I will say that I’m not pleased with the way it looks in the finished product I had in the video. And I expect I will shorten the hoses and add another hole through the wall of the compartment so that I can actually put the valve right up against the wall of the compartment and have those hoses just long enough to get to the other side of the compartment wall.

And just to give you some more details on the video that came out today of the Rocky Face Recreation Area Hike

, that is a very nice hiking area about 12 miles from my house. It actually took us 2 times of hiking there to get that video together. Mostly because I am an idiot.  The first time we hiked there it was very hot and we stopped to rest on a rock halfway up the mountain. When I sat down and put down my camera gear and all my equipment and played with the puppy and Dakota for a minute, when I got up I forgot to make sure I had the dogs leash and left it on this rock halfway up the mountain. Unfortunately I didn’t notice until we were on the other side of the mountain on our way down and some people were coming and I went to find the leash to put it on them. So we stopped filming and had to walk quickly more or less at heel back to the parking area and then I had to run up the mountain alone to find the leash. So half of that hike had been ruined and not filmed. So a few days later we went up near that area and I decided we would stop and do the hike over again and get some better video and some good scenic shots from the top of the mountain where we would not have gone the other day because it was too hot. But it just goes to show you the wonderful things you can do with editing. Hopefully you didn’t notice that Akela looks much older in certain parts of the video.

Well, the boys are falling asleep on me as I do this, so I better get off of here and go play with them or they will be ready to play at 3 o’clock in the morning while I’m trying to get sleep. Especially Akela, it happens a lot. Thanks for stopping by folks, I hope this is somewhat interesting. I got other more interesting ideas I think I want to rant about, I’m now writing them down so that I can put them together into the blog. So I hope you bear with me when I do those.

Hope to see in the campground or on the trail,
Rick, Dakota, Aquila (Caesar 2.0)