Our toilet base had arrived so we installed the toilet again, disassembled it again and put the new base on. By this time we were old hands at taking apart the toilet so no problems. When we went to reinstall the toilet the it was a bit wobbly so we tried tightening the bolts holding to the floor more and managed to break the toilet mounting collar on the floor. The mounting collar is screwed into the floor and is has bolts to hold the toilet. Our mounting collar wasn’t just a mounting collar though, it was connected to the sewer pipe going to our tank. If we tried replacing the mounting collar we would have had to pull out the pipe to the sewage tank and then who know how much trouble it would be to reconnect that pipe.
We went to Home Depot and got these metal mounting collar repair brackets but they were for house toilets so didn’t quite fit our toilet collar so we had to go back again and have them drill some extra holes so it would fit our collar. After several tries we got the repair brackets in under the collar and managed to get the toilet reinstalled only to find the toilet was still wobbly since the mounting collar was a little bit higher with the repair brackets. This time instead of overtightening the bolts we stuck some shims under the toilet and we now finally have a fully functional toilet again.
A motorhome is basically a house and a car and needs to be maintained just like a house and a car but it is all in one. It needs all the maintenance a car does: gas, oil change, transmission fluid change, break fluid, new wheels, breaks, lights, filters, etc. It also needs all the maintenance that a house does: toilets, sinks, light bulbs, air conditioner, heating, air conditioner, door, cabinets, tables etc. The difference is that for the car part, usually a motorhome is always heavily loaded or often overloaded. This causes extra wear and tear on the vehicle. For the house part it is usually not built as sturdy as a regular house with no brick or stone or concrete. It is made from mostly plywood, Styrofoam and veneers to keep the weight down. Also unlike a regular house, a motorhome is subjected to strong earthquakes while enduring hurricane strength 75 mile an hour winds on a regular basis. It is not unusual to hit bumps where cabinet doors fly open and things fall out. I am constantly having to tighten screws and worry about cabinets separating from walls. When people ask me how much maintenance a motorhome needs I tell them, it is like the maintenance needed for a car and a cheaply made house put together plus a bit more.
RV’s are also not designed for living in and long term use. They are really designed to be used a few times a year for a week a time so they wear out much faster than regular houses. A 10 year old RV is considered quite old. That being said there are quite a few 20, 30, even 40 year old RV’s around.
That all being said, I must note we have had remarkably few problems with our motorhome and we have been able to fix most of them ourselves. We have not had to deal with any RV service departments for repairs at all. We do not have any horror stories of being homeless for weeks while our RV is in the shop. One benefit of having a home that is held together by screws is that it is usually easy to fix things by simply unscrewing it and either repairing or replacing the item. If anyone is interested in reading about all the upgrades we have made to our motorhome, please leave a comment and we will make a post.
It was not all work though. First we went to Take Flight at the Wilderness Resort. It is a short movie on a round screen with moving seats. The movie had clips of various scenic areas of the US like the Grand Canyon, the Golden Gate Bridge and parts of Wisconsin. The round screen and the moving seats made you feel like you were flying around the sights. We enjoyed it but it was only 8 minutes long so I am not sure it is worth the $20 regular admission.
On the way out we passed a Wyndham timeshare desk which offered us a set of waterpark passes to the Wilderness resort and 30,000 Wyndham points good for a couple nights hotel if we gave them 90 minutes of our time. We love getting free stuff from timeshare presentations and a quick calculation I figured the gifts were worth about $300-400 so it was worth 90 minutes of our time. We attended the timeshare presentation and the salesperson could quickly tell we weren’t going to buy so we spent a while chatting about cooking and travelling until our 90 minutes were up. Our salesperson never even told us the price of the timeshare.
After the presentation we immediately changed into our swimsuits and enjoyed the rest of the day at the Wilderness Adventure Waterpark.
We went on the Original Wisconsin Duck Boat tour. A Duck boat is an old WWII amphibious landing craft that looks like a boat with wheels and can drive on land as well as the water. The tour was an hour long and we went through some forests and gulches and then along the scenic Wisconsin River. The vehicle itself was rather loud and smell of exhaust fumes. It was an interesting experience but looks a lot more fun that it is. After the Duck boat we went the do the Go Karts and Olivia had her first solo go kart drive. She did great and had a great time.
The next day we went to Magiquest. This was a sort of escape room/scavenger hunt where we had to follow clues to find four dragons within an hour. The environment was separated into air, water, fire and earth areas and were mostly well decorated with their themes. There were slides, hidden doors and secret passages to discover so it was pretty cool. They had different difficulty levels for younger kids and I would recommend giving it a try.
On Monday we checked out of the Country Roads RV park and we went back to the Wilderness Resort to use those free water park wristbands we had gotten from the timeshare presentation. The resort has a West/Wilderness theme and designed like a wilderness lodge but that was about as far as the theme went. Wilderness Resort does not normally sell day passes and consists of four indoor and four outdoor waterparks. This was good in some ways as it allowed for a much bigger total waterpark size than Kalahari Resorts. For example they had one building that just had the wave pool and a couple of slides so the Wilderness wave pool was over twice as big as the Kalahari wave pool. The smaller buildings made it easier to control the humidity in the buildings so the air was better. However it was more of a hassle going from one area to another with some of the waterparks areas requiring a shuttle ride. The slides themselves were the standard lazy river, twisty dark enclosed tubes, the raft slides and the toilet bowls. Still we had a good time and stayed until closing. Even better, we heard that the wristbands would be good for all week.
While exploring we had found a nice Cracker Barrel so we were back to free boondocking.