Wednesday August 4th 2021

Today’s weather was a clone of Tuesday. The high was in the mid eighties and the brisk north wind kept the humidity down. It was a good day to be outside provided you didn’t have to be in the direct sun.

My big adventure for the day was the laundry. One of the amenities at this campground is free laundry. The owners have built little buildings on trailers with a restroom for each gender and a laundry. This approach allows them to disconnect the facilities from the utilities and move it to higher ground when the river rises. For a few weeks in the spring most years the park is under water.

Inside the little building on a trailer I found two sets of stackable washer dryers. These are not the traditional commercial machines, but high end residential units. That’s where the fun began. You need a Masters Degree in laundry to figure out how to use them. First of all with most of the commercial machines I’ve been using the last few years, you set all the parameters and then hit the start button. On this unit nothing can happen until you hit the start button which is actually an on button. It took two or three minutes to figure that out. I verified that the machines were plugged in and a few other things before I started pushing random buttons. That is when I figured out the start button is actually a power button. Once the computer controlled machine booted you could spin the dial to select the cycle you wanted before modifying the parameters with a bunch of light up buttons. The actual start button looks like the “play” button on your audio or video playback device.

The machine said it wood take 53 minutes to complete the wash and it was pretty much on the mark. My clothes were cleaner than they’ve come out of the laundry in most of the last few laundry days. The dryer was equally as confusing, but at least I knew the magic sequence. It forecast the dry cycle would take 32 minutes. I thought that was a little optimistic and somewhere along the way the machine decided it needed more time. When I returned at 32 minutes the timer read 12 minutes remaining. After twelve minutes it still thought it would be ten minutes. Eventually everything was dry. So my adventure of the day took about two and a half hours between the actual washing, drying and folding.

The boat traffic on the river seemed a little slow today. The barge combos I saw were all pretty ordinary. I still haven’t seen any significant southbound traffic.