Back home, Camp Chef Oven, and Grandkids Last Blast Before School Starts

Well, we've been home exactly one week from our big Canada and New England vacation. 

We got in a visit with Steve's dad at hospice and also Steve got his hair cut after cancelling his appointment while we were on the road. We are getting settled back in and doing all the things that we've wanted to catch up around the house. Our neighbors kept very good care of our house and took care of lawn cutting and harvesting tomatoes. The grandkids came over and watered flowers and plants. We had plenty of rain so the rain barrels took care of all of our needs without having to turn on city water in the house.

Like I said in my last blog, we turn off the water at the main valve while we are gone. Our daughter once had a mishap with a bad fitting on a dishwasher that flooded their entire first floor and almost ruined all of their hardwood! It's a vintage schoolhouse so the insurance company opted to pull up all the original hardwood floors, have it all re-kiln dried, and laid them all back down again. Then they were all sanded and stained and polyurethane sealed. The insurance company said it was cheaper to do that than to actually put down new flooring! Can you imagine? So after that experience, we always make sure we turn off our water when we leave for any length of time. We have vintage hardwood floors that I would hate to see damaged.

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We learned a few things on our trip. Especially after using our new to us Winnebago View for an extended period. We love the ease and maneuverability of it. We love how everything has a place, and we have already taken out some things we are not using. We love the features and the storage and everything works quite well.

But.... I have never really cared for convection ovens. So much so, that in our last motor home we actually removed two of the lower cabinet drawers and installed a larger RV stove with a propane oven. That made me very happy.

In this motorhome, we could do that, but it's going to sacrifice a lot of our very valuable drawer space.

During our trip, one morning I baked muffins in the convection oven. It's so high up over my head it's not even at eye level for me. It's pretty dangerous for me to pull things out of the oven while reaching up over this little flimsy rotating rack that you need to use when you're in convection mode. I actually burned my knuckle a little bit, dropped the whole pan of muffins upside down onto the counter below, which broke into a million pieces and made a huge mess!

The other disadvantage of the convection oven is that you need to have a power source to make it operate. So unless we are camped somewhere with a power hookup to electricity in a campground, the only other way it can be used is if we are running the generator. I don't think anybody wants to hear us fire up a generator at 7:00 in the morning in the rustic wooded campground to bake muffins? This was one of our main reasons why we had converted the stove and oven in our last motorhome. 

So Steve and I decided that to bake regular items or prepare baked dinner meals when we are traveling, we would like a propane oven. We just had to figure out what we were going to do.

Many many years ago I had a little portable Coleman propane oven. It was called the Coleman Instastart oven. I called it my Easy Bake Oven. It was so cute and we used it an awful lot. We sold it long ago when we upgraded to the inside stove/oven combo.  Wish we never sold it....  We went online and saw that they are not made anymore. We thought maybe we could search for a used one on eBay.  We started reading some reviews, and instead came up with an idea.

This Camp Chef stove and oven is highly recommended by a lot of people on the RVing lists. Even people with van conversions or little pod trailers with outdoor kitchens. We started reading the reviews and they were really good.

We looked online and they run in the $200 to $250 range. Ouch!!  

We watched some YouTube videos about it, and read more reviews. Then we saw someone had them on sale at Costco for about $150. None of the local Costco's in our area had them, nor do we even have a Costco membership. 

Back to the drawing board. 

So then Steve searched on Facebook Marketplace. Here was a lady within 25 miles of our house, who sells new-in-the-box packaged merchandise that she buys by the pallet full from somewhere. She has a rented warehouse and regular hours every week to come in and buy items. And sure enough, she had one of these Camp Chef stoves new in the box for only $90!

We contacted her and told her to hold it until we could get there. She agreed and we got there before she closed at 4:00 p.m. The box did have a puncture hole which is why it was probably sold on a pallet auction. But it was still sealed from the factory and unopened. She let us open it up and everything was intact and complete. There was one tiny little ding on the lower edge of the oven. Cosmetic only and didn't bother the function. Steve looked closer and figured he could even pop it right back out. Sold!

We brought it home and put it all together. Yes, Steve was later able to take the ding out of the bottom edge just like he figured. You just got to love that guy hey?

On top are two 8,000 BTU burners that we can cook outside or perk coffee or even pop popcorn if we want. This will be nice if it's too hot to cook inside of the camper, we could be out here making breakfast on the stove top and make toast inside the oven portion. The lid lifts up with side wings for a windscreen, and folds down for storage. It has piezo ignition, no matches needed. It can run off the 1 pound green cylinders or our 5 pound or a 20 pound grill tank via a hose. 

The oven itself is very generous. The inside measurements are 15 in wide by 11 in deep. It can hold a 9x11 pan easily with space all the way around. It comes with two baking racks and three different positions. It came with one of these nice baking pans but I had another one from Tfal that I added to the repertoire. Also my larger muffin pans from the house will fit in here, which are better than the small ones that I used to try to use in the convection oven. 

I added a 9" pizza stone from Meijer store to the bottom burner cover (not in this pic) which helps even out the heat distribution when baking. Long time RV oven baking trick! 

We started it up and burned off any new manufacturing smells. We also put in a small oven thermometer because the one that is built in is sometimes inaccurate. So now we can tell what the actual temperature is inside the oven and adjust accordingly.

The overall size of the unit is 25 in long by 15 in deep by 18 inches high. If fits absolutely perfectly in the bottom of our closet underneath our clothes, so it has a nice secure spot to ride along with us.

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Speaking of cooking and baking, during our search for YouTubes on this particular propane oven, we found this other YouTube on baking cinnamon rolls. It's just a random You Tube, not specifically for this oven. They can be baked in any oven. He shows how to take a tube of refrigerator cinnamon rolls and doctor them up before baking into the most amazing tasting cinnamon rolls! You'll have to watch the video to find out what the guy does. But we did it this morning and they are absolutely delicious. Steve said that we are never going to do them the old original way again. 

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Before we left on vacation, we had promised all of the grandchildren that we would come back in time before school starts to take them miniature golfing. And that is just what we did! We are missing Clayton, because he decided to spend the week at his other grandfather's house. But we will take him another time all by himself. So we had four of them to take for a day of adventure.

Here is a little YouTube that I shot of the fun we had over at the mini golf here in Oconto, some are slide show shots and some video segments interspersed as well.

We also decided to tie dye t-shirts 

like we did last year 

right before school started

They needed to lay the pre-washed t-shirt flat on the floor. Then take a dinner fork and stick it in the middle and rotate. It helps to have a second set of hands to help group it together and keep it level. It gets rolled up, just like a cinnamon roll!

Once it's rolled up into a flat spiral, then rubber bands are stretched around it at various intervals to hold it tight and to create marks where the dye will not absorb as easily.

The kids put on old t-shirts as smocks and we covered our plastic tables for the project. The kids put on rubber gloves to protect themselves. I had picked up a tie dye kit and Chelsea had one to bring over too. They've done this already, so they knew what to do again!

Even 15-year-old Jameson got into the act and he really worked hard to customize his black and red and white dyed shirt. He said those are his favorite colors. 

Here are the bundled up t-shirts in their rubber banded cinnamon roll configuration. Whitney and Claire did every color under the sun. Chelsea chose to do blue green and yellow. And Jameson's of course was black and red.  I did a white sweatshirt in only blue. 

We let the dye soak in while we were gone miniature golfing... It sure was a lot of fun. Grandpa is the one that knocked his ball into the water hazard three times! The kids thought it was hilarious having to scoop it out with the little dipper nets for him.

They really had a lot of fun playing all 18 holes. Claire developed a method that she called "Drag and Drop". She would just corral the ball in the curved edge of her putter and drag it right the hole and let it drop in. That's okay, whatever works.

Jameson and Grandpa both tied scores of 60 from 18 holes. They had a lot of fun and it was worth the ride in the convertible as a reward on the way back home. Chelsea and I drove separately in the Saturn. There just weren't enough seats for all six of us in that little convertible. 

We came back home to a pizza party! We cooked up some nice big pizzas and the kids got to eat as much as they wanted with beverages of their choice. Sometimes you just got to spoil them!

Now back to our tie-dye T-shirt progress....  We carefully snipped all the rubber bands to see the creations that they made. What beautiful designs!

The shirts still need to "rest" like this for about 6 to 8 hours before I rinse them and wash them and dry them. So after I finished them by next day, I delivered them to the kids to wear in time for the weekend. 

Kids were having fun playing at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Did you know we happen to have two doctors in the family? They even have office hours at their hospital when they are open and closed. That's good to know. 

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Another thing I had to catch up on since we got home are my tomatoes. They are producing by leaps and bounds from just four regular plants and one Juliet grape tomato plant. We brought some to Steve's dad to snack on. He loves tomatoes. 

I picked a big basket full and judged it was probably another four quart jars worth. I like to do all of my processing in my big kitchen sink and tried to keep the mess all in one spot.

I really miss my Mom when I do canning. Coming from a big family with a large garden, we always had to pitch in and help with the canning during August and September. We had an abundance of vegetables, plus apples for making sauce...  then my parents would do two huge crocks of sauerkraut. The stinky crocks would be percolating for a month before it was ready to get canned up. 

Mom and I would carry all of the jars down to the basement. There we lined up rows and rows, shelf after shelf.  Literally hundreds of jars. We depended on it all winter long. When we would put the last jar in the shelf, my Mom would stand back with her hands on her hips and say "My oh my, are we ever rich!".

I sure miss her.

With her in mind, I took care of slurping my skins off my tomatoes and processing my jars with a smile on my face ---  as I thought of how many years I stood by her side, doing the very same thing.

Soon I had four jars done and in and out of the canning kettle. PING PING PING which is music to a canner's ears.  I have been doing a few jars every few days to keep up with the plants.

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Oh, one more thing we learned when we were traveling is that I really really miss my Microsoft Streets and Trips Program on the laptop along with the GPS dongle. Although Microsoft no longer supports it, it still allows me to do map updates and the program still works on my older laptop. So for our next trip I am taking it along. Now, in our last motorhome I had a nice pull-out laptop desk built in to the front dash on the passenger side. Not so on this Winnebago View.

But we started researching what other people have done to take along a laptop or even a tablet that is accessible from up in the front seat. We found that there is already a very firm frame underneath the passenger seat and already has an accessible hole on one corner that will be perfect for mounting in this articulating arm.. I can swivel it around and it has three different articulation points plus a tilt to get it and a comfortable position in front of me in the passenger seat. It can swing out of the way when not needed and it can even flip up flat if we want it totally out of the way. The laptop can be secured with velcro straps right to the laptop tray. We think this might be the answer to being able to have the Streets and Trips functioning when we travel. 

The little GPS on my phone from Google Maps or the one built into the motorhome dash from Rand McNally just do not let you zoom in and out easily to get big pictures of what you're looking for or where you're headed. Also, you have to go to alternate screens or search boxes to find points of interest or gas stations or campgrounds. I don't find them very "user friendly" and it can make my whole route vanish with one backward touch. Ugh! 

On my Streets and Trips I can plan the route ahead, and look behind, and I can keep exact locations of everywhere we've been. I can save maps and routes and alter them easily. I can add detailed push pins of where we stayed, what site was the best and what we paid. I have maps like this from all of our trips in the past --- ever since we started traveling with a laptop. So I am quite excited to be able to use it again. So much so that I even went in and graphed out our entire last trip just to keep it in our records, even though we didn't have the laptop with us. 

What is really nice is that the Streets and Trips will leave a little blue mouse trail of everywhere you've been, right down to where you've turned around or where you've parked at a wayside and had a little lunch or even where you stayed within a campground or even to know where the dump station was. Things like that are important to me to keep track of and I am looking forward to having the Streets and Trips with us again for our next journey.

So that's it for now...

but we are planning our next camping trip 

after the crazy holiday weekend is OVER 

and the horrible awful temps forecast in the mid 90's are past.