I haven’t heard exactly how low the temperature got last night, but it was either at 0 or below 0.  By the time we were out running errands this morning it was up to 8 degrees.

We got up early this morning because we had an appointment to take the RV in to Les Schwab and get new brakes.  When we had gotten our new tires in Denver Mark noticed that the brakes were getting very thin, so he was eager to get that fixed.  We pulled in the slide out, secured everything inside, and unhooked and unplugged everything outside.  When Mark tried to start the RV, the engine belt was frozen and slipping, so we weren’t able to take the RV in today.

For the last several days Mark has been letting the cold water in our bathroom sink run so it wouldn’t freeze.  We’ve had cold water on that side of the RV (the driver’s side) but not the side where the kitchen sink and the toilet are.  We’ve been using the water from the bathroom sink to flush the toilet and use for drinking, cooking, and washing dishes.  When we thought we were going to go to Les Schwab, Mark of course shut off the water and detached the hose.

When we couldn’t take the RV in, we had some other errands to run so we spent the morning doing that.  This afternoon I went down to the laundry room to wash our clothes and Mark donned his new insulated coveralls and began working on our water situation.  We had bought a bunch of stuff for warming things up and insulating things, so he began putting all of those in place.  When I came back from doing the laundry, he had put an electric wire warmer next to the water hose coming into the RV and was in the process of securing insulation along the length of the hose.  Back close to where he had started I noticed a leak had sprung, so he had to unwrap that section and fix the leak and re-wrap it.  A heat light he’d bought and set up near our water tank is already burned out.  By the time the sun set, Mark came in and turned on the faucets and found we now have no water coming out of any of them.  Very aggravating!

Mark went to the store to buy four gallons of bottled water, and while he was gone I had an image of Moses striking the rock and water flowing out for the Children of Israel in the wilderness.  I thought about striking our water tank to see if that would work!  😉

I made dinner and after we ate, I needed to wash the dishes.  I never realized before how much water that takes.  I poured most of one of the gallon bottles of water into our tea kettle and boiled it.  That gave me about two or three inches of wash water.  I was very sparing with the rinse water and managed to just finish up the rest of the gallon for that.  I’m thinking we might want to buy some paper plates and bowls till our water thaws out.

One of the gallon bottles we keep in the bathroom area for washing our hands and flushing the toilet.  That leaves us two more gallons for cooking, cleaning and drinking.  We will be taking our showers in the bath house across the street.

I was thinking about Laura Ingalls Wilder.  In her youth as a pioneer, she had to go down to the creek to draw buckets full of water and carry them home.  We are actually fortunate that we have a Wallmart about a block away where we can buy bottled water, we have a bath house across the street, and we have a Laundromat here in the park.  We have heat and electricity.  We’ll be spending most of our time the next five days at work where we have access to hot and cold running water.  By the end of the week we’re supposed to be back above freezing, so maybe by next weekend we’ll have water here.  Things aren’t so bad!