Mechanics of Life: Part 5

Assuming we succeed in getting our propane tank filled within a timeframe that fits our plan to leave this area, our constraint here at Bahia Concepcion seems to be water supply. Every place we’ve stayed to date has had water available, either with a hook-up at our campsite, or at least a hose bib somewhere in the campground. Santipac campground here at Bahia Concepcion has neither, so we’re reliant on our 21-gallon on-board supply, and since there are no showers here either, those 21 gallons have to meet a lot of needs. (Note: the book says this place has hot showers, but a day after arrival, we learned the copper pipes behind the shower room had been stolen the previous month, so there are currently no showers). We arrived with full tanks yesterday, and today while we were in town we filled a 5-gallon container, and used it to add to our tanks when we got back. As you learned from our “Business in Mulege” post, it looks like we’ll be back each of the next two days to deal with our propane fill, so there’s an opportunity to add 10 more gallons to our supply. If we had known we were going to get into this situation, we’d have brought more collapsible water jugs since we think we’re probably using more than 5 gallons a day – so at some point we’ll run out of water. We may still buy some jugs when we get to La Paz where there is a Home Depot. One of our neighbors, Frank, who you may hear about in a future post, has already been in this campground for 2 months and plans on staying here another month or two. Today he bought a 170-liter barrel for storing water. In an attempt to recoup his investment, he’s offered to sell us 5 gallons of water for 2 beers, so there’s no chance we’ll literally run out of water. To explain the photo, we discovered in San Diego that the check valve in our “city water” connection on the Chalet was defective (probably went bad in the same freeze that caused our shower attachment to fail that we wrote about early on). So now when we turn on our pump to run water from our tanks into our sink, additional water spurts out of our city water connection. So we bought a hose bib to correct to that, and we use the valve to shut off the flow of water. It works well, but looks pretty funny.