RV Cassette Toilets & More Mice, plus a Holiday Montage!

Happy holidays everyone. Yeah it's hopefully, hopefully you're getting ready for the Christmas season. It's mid-December right now and it's it's like 11 degrees and sunny here. It's very very mild. Yeah so uh yeah we we're just getting ready for the holidays but we thought we'd do a quick video and uh do a little bit of like a fireside chat I guess. Because without the fire. Yeah without the fire. Because we did have some conversations, fun conversations about RVing and van life with our friends in our last video when we went to Porto. And we thought we'd talk about a couple of those things in this video. And also we've got a really nice Christmas video montage to show you of all the nice sites in the Metro Vancouver area. So we hope you enjoy this video. If you watched our last video you know we commented we talked about vans and upgrades to vans and different camp spots that we've been to. And it was it was a lot of fun and sorry just gotta check my, just gotta check my notes for a second. Yeah so we um we talked a lot about uh you know different camping things and uh one of the one of the things the conversation came around to which was kind of funny. Part of it was mice because sadly we had a bit of a mice infestation again this fall. We we showed up at the van one day and I'd just been here two days before. And I looked on the floor and there was what looked like shredded paper towel which seemed unusual. Usually keep the van a little cleaner. Anyway I'd left a piece of paper towel out for something and some mice had taken it and used it along with some other fibers they found to build what looked like a bird's nest. I didn't film it. Anyway we ended up putting out our we have the no harm mouse traps and we ended up catching four mice which we released several kilometers away. No problem since but it was still annoying. Did prompt me to go through and look for other potential entry points. We thought we'd solved it from before but I found a place where one of our water lines came in and it had a reasonably big space. So block that up with some wire. So we're hoping that will be the last of our mice issues at least for this fall. Yeah and actually during our chat with our friends the mice the mouse issue came up and we spent quite a bit of time talking about mice. And I think it this past summer was a really bad year everywhere. Lots of lots of lots of stories of people getting mice in their RVs. And actually our friends that were with us Pete and Alex they've actually installed a I think it's called a rodent repeller or a mice repeller. It runs right off their battery in their van and off the the chassis battery. And it emits a high pitch sound which much to my surprise I could hear. And then has a little bit of blinking light so it's it's intended to keep the mice particularly outside of your engine compartment. So yeah and apparently that's a a place where mice get in quite easily. Yeah the other thing that we talked about was cassette toilets. And you know we've had our van for what close to six years? Almost six years. Six years in January. Yeah and we were joking because during that entire time we've never seen anyone taking their cassette toilet to be emptied in a washroom in any of the parks. So we were wondering are people you know do they wear like great big overcoats when they go and you can't notice them? Or are they going in the middle of the night so the people aren't seeing you carrying these little because they sort of look like you know carry-on bags. So you'd sort of note if somebody was going by in a campground. Anyway it was just something that we'd commented and noticed. Yeah and I think it's also some of the units that we were looking at. Yeah cassette toilets. Potential next RV has cassette toilets and I think that's why we started asking questions. Yeah and Pete and Alex actually have one and you know Pete does you know happily take his to dump in a pit toilet when they need to. So obviously people do it but we just had never seen it so we thought it was kind of interesting. Yeah so if you have a cassette toilet let us know how you dump it. And the other conversation that came up is apparently and we don't have a lot of information on this but you know either Steve or Darlene had mentioned that in the United States now some of the parks are not letting you use cassette toilets. You actually have to have a black tank if you're going to be camping in some of the I think it's potentially some of the state parks and maybe even BLM lands. Some private private campgrounds I guess. Yeah where where they just want to make sure that you're not using your cassette toilet dumping it into their their regular I guess toilets. So that that seemed unusual. We don't know that to be actually the case but we did go online and we saw a lot of chatter about it. So I think it's more to do with the possible spillage when you're actually trying to dump it I think and the mess it might leave behind. If you're responsible then you'll clean it up but not everyone is I guess. I saw some examples of where parks are requiring you to have sort of the equivalent of either a certain number of gallons which would be you know something you'd need to have with a black tank or the ability to you know service your all the all the waste products for I think a three-day window. So just just a number of things. So it's just something to pay attention to particularly if you have a cassette toilet or considering getting an RV with a cassette toilet. Yeah there's uh there's more and more nowadays so it's something to consider. Yeah and certainly some of the RVs that some of the RVs that we've looked at recently have a cassette toilet as an option. So you know that's something that we would have to give more consideration to and and check out and see if that's you know if those those changes are actually happening like what we're what we're hearing online. And obviously if you enjoy a winter RVing it can be an advantage because everything's in located inside and you don't have to worry about your tank freezing. Yeah that would be uh you know certainly one advantage in the winter time and that's one of the reasons we thought about it as well is that you you may be winterized everywhere else but your cassette toilet you could still use without you know any complications. Very difficult to dump your uh your black tank in the winter in part because it's probably not a gallon or so of antifreeze you're not going to want to lose. And then secondly a lot of the dump stations at least at the parks around here are closed in the winter if it's freezing. Now some private places may have they're open all winter long obviously you could they would have a an ability for you to probably just connect right up to the sewer system if you wanted to. Yeah. If you had a regular black tank and of course you could dump a cassette toilet through that same sort of connection as well I think. Yeah so so just some of the fun conversations that come up when you're sitting around a fire watching amazing sunsets. It's for sure it was a lot of fun. Toilets and mice. Yeah and about different campgrounds and travel and yeah it was fun. It was a lot of fun. So far we've done sort of I guess three kind of holiday events. One we went to one of our favorite places which is the Burnaby Heritage Village which always has you know the old building you've seen if you watched our videos you've seen us there before at Christmas time and recently Halloween so we were back there again this year at Christmas. Next we went someplace new that we'd never been to out maybe about an hour drive from us and there was actually snow on the ground much to our surprise. It was pouring rain at the time. Yeah there was snow on the ground and it was raining really heavily and that was a a studio lot that they do some filming at a lot of the Hallmark movies called Martini Village and I think we would have enjoyed it a lot more. Martini Town. Martini Town. Yeah and it's in Langley. And we would have enjoyed it more if it wasn't pouring rain like really raining while we were there. And then just the other night we went to another favorite we haven't been to in a long time Van Dusen Gardens and their festival lights. Yeah and that was that was absolutely wonderful. Okay so I think without further ado we will get into the our holiday greeting video montage. please be sure to give us a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel if you haven't done so already and wishing all of you a happy and safe holiday season and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and hope to maybe in a couple weeks or so we'd like to do our top five campgrounds for 2023 video so please stay tuned for that and we will see you next time. I have to take these off for this. We'll see you next time.