Up to the elbows in brown stuff

If anyone has seen the comedy film RV with Robin Williams they will understand that there comes a time that the holding tanks require emptying. Now, I didn't want to bore you all with the details but some friends of ours suggested, after having the saga related to them, that we should share the experience.

It all starts back at Hogleaze really. This was the storage facility that we were using near Dorchester. When it came time to move from there to our current location it was decided to do some maintenance on the van. One of these jobs was to sanitise the fresh water tank. This entailed pouring an anti-everything agent into the tank, filling it up with fresh water and letting it stand for thirty minutes. When the time was up the water had to be flushed into the holding tanks through all the various pipes in the plumbing system. This filled up the holding tanks, of course, but we had already checked that Hogleaze had a dumping point. What we didn't realise was that the access to the dumping point is at the side of the road and higher than our vehicle. The outlet from the holding tanks is gravity fed!

Oh, well. Not to worry we would dump our tanks when we got to Huntick Farm. Except that they don't have a drive over dump point either. So we used the loo but tried not to put too much water down the sink. Doing the washing up in the toilet block on the site and showering at home. After a couple of weeks of this we decided we had to do something about dumping the tanks, especially when the black water tank suddenly looked as if it was full, so we aproached another site that we new had the facility and asked if we could use it. They said we couldn't, we offered them money, they said they would get back to us. They didn't get back to us so we had a brain wave and booked in for a night at their most basic rate. That was OK and we duly turned up and were directed to the dump point.

When we attempted to connect the hose to the junction things went a bit horrific. The dump valve for one of the tanks had leaked and when the cap was removed all this extremely smelly liquid started to run out. Luckily we had bucket! With this drained we managed to get the hose connected and commenced to drain, what I thought was the black water tank. To ensure it was all gone I asked Tricia to have a look down the loo. She immediately shouted that the tank was still full and, having put some more water in, it was now filling the pedestal. We decided it must be blocked and when I went have a look there was Tricia with the loo brush almost entirely inserted into the loo. Thank goodness for surgical gloves!

Anyway, this was not doing any good and we were in danger of losing the loo brush, so we decided to dump what I thought was the grey water tank and leave the blockage for the moment. It was amazing then, that when I opened the grey water dump valve the blockage immediately cleared. Hey, ho. That's the last time I believe the labels on the side of the van. Some extremely funny person must have switched them at some point. Having now completed the operation we returned to Huntick Farm a little wiser and a lot smellier than we left.