It was an interesting first week. But we also had an “adventure” that affected the entire park. Our house has industrial toilet. There’s no tank or flapper valve. It’s just a water pipe that comes out of the wall. Push a handle, the valve opens, and lots of water noisily rushes out until the valve turns itself off a few seconds later. Except our valve ran for about 2 minutes one evening last week. I reported it promptly, then nothing happened. Monday night, it ran indefinitely. There are no water cutoff valves for the toilet. The water valve for the house is buried underground and requires a special tool. Danita and I had asked several times what to do in an emergency. We received a phone number for the housing coordinator. We called her, but neither she nor we could raise the head of maintenance. She suggested we sleep upstairs (which we ended up doing). I had heard that when this happens, one should flush another toilet. This will temporarily lower the water pressure, allowing the first valve to close. I don’t know if this ever works, but in our case we ended up with two toilets pushing water down the drain as fast as water would roll through the pipes. The head of maintenance finally got the texts and voice mails, and turned the water to our house off somewhere around 11 PM. We were sound asleep by them. The park has its own water treatment plant. The water that rolled through our house for 2 to 3 hours overwhelmed all the water plant systems. Everything was fixed by 9 or 9:30 the next day. But every last person in the park knows us as the folks who had a plumbing problem that affected the water.
Whatever adventures we end up having, they won’t compare to what some visitors experience. I was thinking about writing about the couple that lost a fender and wanted to find out if anybody had retrieved it from the beach. But a better example occurred just minutes before closing on Friday. A couple called because they were somewhere in the back country, driving in the surf, and their transmission stopped working. (Unlike in the movies, driving in the surf is a really bad idea in the real world.) Nobody was on hand to help. (One needs a truck with 7″ of clearance and 4-wheel drive just to travel safely on the sand.) The only thing we could do was to text them phone numbers for the 4 towing companies that have trucks capable of towing on the sand and wish them luck. Was the tide coming in? Did their car end up under water? I guess we’ll hear the rest of the story next week.
Our week was packed with positive experiences. We visited the back country in a truck that could safely travel on sand, driven by an expert who stayed well away from the surf. We visited the Virginia side of the island, learned a lot about the ecology of the area, and saw lots of horses. We spent all of Thursday and Friday outside. It was the first two warm days of the year, so we enjoyed excellent weather with no bugs. That’s very rare combination on Assateague Island.
Saturday we drove home to swap cars. We used our known-good charging station, which worked fine. We had no problems on the drive. We’ll be taking our gas car down tomorrow. I’ll end this with pictures of the area. It’s just about what one would expect.
The folks with Danita are Brooks and Travis. They are great guys with amazing knowledge of the wildlife, history, and ecology of the area. The tombstone is the only remaining evidence of an early cemetery. (It was the only stone tombstone.) The woods area is a typical back-country campsite. There’s nothing but a vault toilet and a picnic table. The water was very clear because it was still cold enough that there was a minimum of all those very small and widely assorted living critters in the water. The last pics are general landscape.
