![\"anacortes-sewer-cap.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/10\/anacortes-sewer-cap.jpg\" "\\"anacortes-sewer-cap.jpg\\"")
<\/a>Last night I reported that we had a full hookup at $21 in this campground, a bargain. But I didn’t actually connect things last night, Eleanor did. There was a cap with some writing on it. Eleanor glanced at this and saw the words, “Water,” “Sewer” and “ON” and assumed it was a sewer outlet.<\/p>\nNope.<\/p>\n
What it actually says is better revealed in the second photo, which shows the cap right-side up. This is in fact a cover for a valve to shut off the water supply in winter.<\/p>\n
Well, let’s just cut to the conclusion. The situation was eventually cleaned up, mostly, and various people were cleaned up, and we fled, um, “departed” the campground for a very nice drive through Fidalgo and Whidbey islands. I don’t think Eleanor saw much during the first 15 minutes because she was liberally applying Purell to her hands and talking about how we were going to get a bill from the City for this episode.<\/p>\n I think in the course of driving through the islands for an hour we experienced half a dozen major weather shifts. Eventually we ended up on the M\/V Klickitat, a ferry originally built in 1927, to Port Townsend.<\/p>\n Our friends from the campground steered us well. When we got to the Olympic National Park visitor center, we found that in addition to the seasonal campground closures that we knew about, two more campgrounds and a couple of roads were closed due to recent severe weather. This eliminated quite a bit of what we wanted to do on the first day in Olympic, so we decided to try one of the campgrounds suggested by the Ritcheys, Salt Creek Recreation Area (a county park).<\/p>\n<\/a>Now, if I were the guy who had to shut off this water valve each season, I’d probably take much more aggressive steps to prevent people from accidentally confusing this with a sewer dump. Just one person, say for example a female person trying to help her husband and working in near-darkness, who finds this 4″ pipe that looks just like a sewer dump<\/em>, in exactly the spot you’d expect to find a sewer dump, and who doesn’t carefully<\/em> study the arcane inscription on the cap, and accidentally dumps a load of raw sewage down it … well, it certainly is a formula for ruining everyone’s day. The pipe is several feet deep and that’s a lot of you-know-what down the hole.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n