#285b Stop two Belle Ridge Campground, Monterey, TN

I found a place that was pretty good for like 40 bucks for the night. They even have a big old fish fry there at the campground every week starting on Thursday through Sunday. It was a Wednesday so they were closed. I was all ready but we missed it by one day.

We ended up at Belle Ridge. It was a little pricey maybe 42. I wasn't happy about it but we needed to stop and they had what we needed. We got there after hours so they had a little packet out front for us which is why sometimes you do you need to make reservations.

Not us just a view of the campground

It was a pull through and he had helped me pick the site knowing we were coming in after dark. The site he picked was easy to ease into in the dark. It was nothing fancy just a place to rest so we can go for three more hours.

It struck me as a very popular type place with several hundred sites. It seems like it would be a good place to go in the summer but pretty tough in the winter. It was 20 degrees or so that night. We had lost our gas heat along the way so we pretty much needed full hookups so we use our baseboard electric heat. Randall doesn't like cold. For me the sooner we got there the better.

After we settled in I hooked up to the sewer and dumped our tanks and took a hot bath. It was dang cold that night and the sewer line froze solid. I had to unthaw the sewer sewage with hot water or something the next morning just to be able to leave. There are some things that RVs do that no one else will ever have to deal with. You've got a 10 or 15-foot flexible 3-inch sewer line that has various forms of sewage in it that is frozen solid. It is now stiff as a tree trunk and that's about as strange as it gets. Although you know you can't leave with it like that you wonder where to start. You can't even really disconnect it until you can pour some boiling water on it. The next problem is when you do begin to get it to thaw you get the liquefied version of what's in it which is also quite bad. I’m just saying it's one of my weirder RV moments let's just go with that.

I finally heated the sewer line enough to disconnect from the RV. I aimed it up a hill with the flow towards the sewer connection in the ground. After thawing out the garden hose water started flowing freely from the hose. Since well water is about 55 degrees I allowed it to trickle into the open end of my 15-foot frozen sewage sickle. The water flow began to erode a ½ inch passage of water flow through the sewage log and began to melt all its contents into the septic receiver. Soon I could turn on the hose full force and in no time the sewer hose was empty again. I was thrilled all this happened without me having to get intimate with the sewage. To go back a little bit I had to put boiling water on the actual faucet handle to make it actuate enough to open that was pretty weird. The whole thing was a little weird. I wanted to add that all this was happening early so what a hard way to start one's day. When I first went outside to prepare to leave I thought I would only be out there 5 minutes. Since all this took about an hour in 20 degrees plus a 10 mile an hour wind chill factor I could only work for 5 minutes at a time. I would have to stop and go inside the RV and warm up. This is an example of why we like wintering in Florida.

Address: 15341 Crossville Hwy, Monterey, TN