Life on the Road; Great Views and Weird TV

Today is our last day at Chutes Provincial Park in Massey, Ontario and our last day in Canada. We have seen so much beauty and met many wonderful people. I hate to leave Canada, but I know winter is coming so it’s time to go. Chutes is named for the waterfalls and rapids of the River aux Sables which runs through here just before it joins the Spanish River and heads to Lake Huron.

There’s a very nice trail here that takes you through the woods along the river.

The Seven Sisters Rapids show off the glacial scraped preCambrian rock of the Canadian Shield.

Views of the river were framed with fall colors.

Below the main falls was a section of river with gentle rapids.

Here the river was thick with spawning salmon. I didn’t think these could be salmon, but found there’s a subspecies of Atlantic salmon that are “lake-locked”. They never get to the ocean and they only reach an average size of 12 to 20 inches. Each of those dark shadows is a fish. It looked like a real banquet for a bear, but we saw no evidence of bears.

This would have been a restful stop if the satellite TV antenna hadn’t driven us nearly batty. This was the site I had booked. It had some afternoon sun, but the openings to the southwest, where the DirecTV satellites are, were fairly small. We moved the antenna around to about five places but could never get a signal.

Since Bud had been without TV for our stay at Mikisew Provincial Park I thought he’d be willing to move if we could get a site that would give us TV. I found this site, which might look the same but on the other side of those trees is an open field, and it’s on the southwest side of the site. The only problem was it was booked for the weekend. We decided it was worth it to move after two nights, so yesterday afternoon we came here.

One drawback was that the power post was on the wrong side of the site, but since we have a 30 foot 50 amp extension cord we could manage. The cord from the trailer is running under it from the other side. I put the junction up on the picnic table bench to help protect it from moisture.

We had to use our 75 foot RG11 coaxial antenna cable, but we made it out through the trees. But no TV! Huh? We checked the cable ends, we even swapped ends. We tried three 25 foot cables joined with splicers in case there was a problem with the big one. We didn’t expect that to work and it didn’t. In all the fussing I noticed a nut on the antenna housing had turned as we tightened the cable. Convinced that the cable must be loose inside we removed the plastic dome. Everything looked fine. We put it out without the dome and watched the gears move the dish to line it up with the satellites. We didn’t think it was pointing towards where our phone app said the satellites should be. We moved it so it would have a clearer shot where it seemed to point; that was worse. We gave up and put the dome back on.

This morning we moved it back to the original position. This is the view it has towards the southwest. There are no obstructions; it should work. Bud started fussing again. He took the dome off. He tried aiming it by hand. He let it reset again and it started to pick up a signal but it still wouldn’t come on. He let it sit for about a half hour and then reset it again. It worked. So what changed? Meanwhile it was supposed to rain in the next hour and the dome was still off so he went out and very carefully put the dome back on. It’s still working. Today is Bud’s birthday, so happy birthday Bud, you have TV. And tomorrow we leave.