Back to Wisconsin: Whitewater Lake Campground

My Scamp trailer has not received much use this year.  That needed to change.  After returning home from Alaska, I had a few days before it was time to pick up my son Justin from his summer education program at UW-Whitewater.   My first thought was to head north to a new state park or county park for a couple of days of camping, but then I realized that I could use the Scamp to camp and move my son’s belongings and medical equipment home.

Kettle Moraine State Forest has two units:  north and south.  The south unit has several campgrounds, and one of those campgrounds, Whitewater Lake,  is only about fifteen minutes from my son’s college.  Whitewater Lake is lightly used, especially during the middle of the week.  There are no hookups or showers.  There are water spigots and pit toilets.  Most of the sites are heavily wooded, especially the west loop.  I stayed in the east loop to take advantage of partial sun so that I could use my Renogy solar suitcase to keep my new Renogy pure gel battery fully charged.

The Scamp uses 12 volt power for lights, water pump, portable fan, and to recharge electronic devices. My site had full sun in the mornings, and I was able to fully top off my battery each day with the solar panel.

This was not a hiking trip, although I found it easy to hike 5-7 miles each day by walking Elvis the service dog through the campground loops and the lightly traveled road out to Rice Lake.

Whitewater Lake itself isn’t all that close to the Whitewater campground.

About a five-minute drive away without good walking access, it features a beach and a boat landing. I was able to pull in two bars of LTE for T-mobile at the boat landing, where I downloaded my daily newspaper.

I tried to hike the segment of the Ice Age Trail that passes close to the campground, but the mosquitoes and biting flies cut those attempts short.
How did I spend my time at Whitewater Lake?  Mostly, I read.  I started and completed “The Fallen” by David Baldacci.  I read some “Game of Thrones”, which is my go-to book when I’m between books.  And I read the Milwaukee daily newspaper from beginning to end.  Sadly, that doesn’t take as long as it did at one time.  At night, Elvis and I sat by the campfire and listened to the owls and coyotes.

This was very relaxing trip.  After the constant action of Alaska, I needed some quiet and downtime.  Elvis had no objections.

On my last night, I drove in to Whitewater and took Justin out for sushi (his request).  I am a big sushi fan, but Whitewater, Wisconsin is a long ways from any ocean.  We each had five different kinds of raw fish, well-presented, and four tasted quite fresh.

On the next morning, I hitched up the Scamp and drove over to Justin’s dorm.  His primary caregiver had everything cleaned up and packed into plastic totes.  I loaded all the totes into the Scamp, put the Hoyer lift and shower chair into the pickup bed and headed home.  An hour later, Julia picked up Justin and his few remaining things in the wheelchair van.

With regard to Justin’ first month at college, his caregivers did an outstanding job.  Every semester will be a bit of a battle to line up reliable caregivers, so we were grateful that the summer session went well.  I think that Justin liked the freedom of college life.  As with most young adults, there is a learning curve to balance freedom and responsibility.  I think he learned some things about himself and his potential.  Time will tell.

I had one learning curve of my own during the camping trip.  Fortunately, this episode does not include pictures.  I have not previously used the gas water heater on the Scamp, and I wanted to take a shower before going out to dinner with Justin.  Following the manual, I set the temperature in the middle.  The water heater kicked on right away, and it heated up to the set temperature and then shut off just like it was supposed to.  I disrobed, entered the tiny bathroom and decided that the best way to shower was to sit down on the toilet (this is a wet bath).

I didn’t want to waste any water, so I turned on the shower briefly to get myself wet all over, and then soaped up with the water off.  The water was a little cold, but I thought that maybe the hot water hadn’t made it from the water heater to the shower. When I turned on the shower again, using only the hot water knob, the water was not at all warm. 

As I was screwing around with the shower head and knob to get things warmer, the shower head fell apart on me with cold water randomly spraying at me, and little bits and pieces of the shower head falling into the water below.  Eventually, I found all of the bits, got them together again, and got the shower running only to realize that the manual instructions were horribly wrong as to where the setting needed to be to get warm water.  I finished up my cold shower, dried off, and got dressed.

I turned the thermostat to 3/4 of the way to hot, and the water heater dutifully created hot water.  Next time, I’ll have a hot shower. Learning curves.