Stayin’ Inside

Cold. Very cold. So cold that we cannot run our heat pumps in our coach. We have to use our furnace. The furnace uses diesel. And we are starting to run low on diesel fuel.

Since coming back to Ontario we have been experiencing winter weather.

You can see why we usually wait until the end of April to return to Canada from the sunny and warm southern states. The weather forecast for the rest of this week is not encouraging. I’ve posted the temperatures in Fahrenheit for my American friends. My Canadian friends already know how cold it is right now.

With the wind chill, the outside temperatures are even colder making it a challenge to move the coach to dump tanks and to fill our fresh water tank. That operation, which can take several hours, seems much longer when you are standing outside in the wind in freezing cold temperatures.

When we made the long drive back from Florida, we had to drive another five hours in Ontario. We had no choice but to fuel the coach at a truck stop about 30 miles from where we are currently parked. That was a little over two weeks ago. We are now at half a tank. With the cold, we might be able to last another week before needing to refill the fuel tank in our coach.

And that will put us smack in the middle of more pandemic vigilantes.

We had a particularly nasty encounter when we last filled up our diesel tank, due, in part, to how the media was covering the return of snowbirds to Canada and due, in part, to the darker side of human behaviour. The incident was aimed at Lorraine when she went in to pay for the fuel. We were not able to pay for fuel at the pump. This is true for most truck stops as we do not have a commercial fleet account. We have to prepay inside before fuelling and then return inside after fuelling to complete the transaction.

Immediately after we crossed the border into Canada, we had unhooked the Lincoln. The battery in the car was getting low after being towed for 23 hours. The supplementary braking system does draw on the car’s battery.

Lorraine was driving separately in our car and, to save us some time, she went in to pre-pay as I waited in line behind a truck for a pump. Lorraine wore a mask and gloves but our motorcoach made it clear that we were one of those people daring to return from Florida as potential carriers of COVID-19. And she was told by some trucker — who used very foul language — to get out and stay in her vehicle. The cashier, thankfully, was considerate and understanding.

Needless to say, with concerns about COVID-19 even more heightened now, the last thing I want to do is to take the coach out for more fuel.

If the weather was more spring-like, a topped up tank would last us several months.

Not in this cold. And not with COVID-19.

We have little choice but to follow the advice of this video.