To say that our day was bad, didn’t go according to plan and had little to no happy ending would be an understatement. So I won’t even give this day the satisfaction of my well-chosen words. I will, instead, recount the events of the very end of the day and wee early minutes of day 17.
The Great Dump Heist
Minutes after we got into the RV and peeled off the layers of disappointment and exhaustion from the day, I crawled in bed with Rudy, Sandi went “upstairs” (the cabover) to sleep, and Jared and Kim were going to find a place near the beach to sleep for the night. That was the plan… 2 hours later, after being totally shaken up in the back and in and out of sleep, I realized we were STILL driving. I sent Jared a text from the back, “What’s going on?!?” Here’s what happened…
During the several failed attempts to find beach parking, Kim and Jared had seen a State Park sign that had a camper icon and indicated a dump facility on site. This was great news because we were at 110% capacity. For anyone who has had an RV or boat, you completely understand this. For those who don’t, fill a Tupperware container with your own waste, put it in the back seat of your car with the lid slightly askew, and drive around some pot hole covered streets for 2 days. Enjoy!
Ok. So, Jared is a by-the-book kind of man, but as I said, it had been a really long day, and all of us – like our toilet – were at 110% capacity. So, when Kim and Jared drove through the entrance to the state park and saw the sign that read, “No unauthorized vehicles or campers.”, it barely took a nudge from Kim to convince Jared to do what can only be described as a “drive-by-dumping”.
Like a stealthy, skillfully trained ninja, Jared put Kim on watch (to save her from barfing) and, with the hands of a surgeon, he pulled out the hose, attached it to our tank and pulled the broken lever to release the physical and mental waste that we had carried with us for days. So quietly, in fact, that Rudyard and I, who were sleeping in the back where all the activity was taking place, heard nothing and never moved.
Once the waste was gone and the pieces put back, Jared and Kim headed out of the park towards the ranger station. The moment of truth. If they were going to be caught, it was going to be now. Holding their breath, they rolled toward the station, saw no one, and rolled right out of the park! “What now?” asked Jared, and, as Kim puts it, “Like two kids who just got away with pinching a candy bar, we were full of giddy adrenaline and decided to journey the hour and a half to Hayward.” It was about twenty minutes from our destination, amidst the treacherous roads, that Sandi and I seemed to wake simultaneously and wonder why the heck we were still driving… Kim and Jared were just grinning ear to ear.
