Howdy All,

In the process of flushing our water system Matt discovered a new bit o’ info about our new Minni Winny. This was about the 104th new tid bit of the thousands that we will soon discover living in the RV full time. What he learned is that in this specific model of RV the bathroom sink actually runs to the black water tank.

Let me break this down for you non RV’ers. The clear tank is your fresh water. I don’t think we’ll be drinking from it, but it is where the water is pulled from when you are lathered up and soapy in the shower and need a rinse off. After that water takes the soap off your cute little body it goes into the “Grey” water tank to be drained. The 3rd tank that we have is the “black” water tank. It is aptly named this because this is where the water (presumably pretty dark in color) goes from the potty. Gross, I know.

So when Matt was flushing the water system by running fresh water through all the hoses to the all the sinks and shower and letting them drain into the grey water tank he was actually overfilling the black water tank from the bathroom sink. He discovered this when the overflow started to leak out. Gross, I know. So I came home from work to see my Hubby draining small amounts of black water into an old trash can and walking it into our bathroom to flush. Gross, I know. Well, it’s not that bad. To clarify we had not used the toilet in the RV and it came to us drained. This was for all intent and purposes grey water.

Anyways, the time had come for our first trip to the “Elimination” Station. I have chosen to use the word “Eliminate” in place of the word “Dump”. Dump takes me straight to a prison or a construction site where unruly men, who scratch themselves in public and spit a lot, say things like “I just took the biggest dump ever…” or “Dinner was great, i need to take a dump”. Since I am (as far as I know) the only person who chooses “eliminate” to replace “dump” I will still need to look for “dump stations” on our phone’s new Trucker app. With a quick search we discovered that there is an “elimination station” in Mission Bay. Better still it is a free one. We also noted that there is an average cost of $5-$10/”elimination” in most places. So off we went. Husband, Wife and RV with full tanks to Mission Bay to eliminate.

The process was not nearly as disgusting as I thought it would be. Let me paint a picture for you since I did not have the forethought to snap one. There is a driveway that you turn into from the street and it takes you past a hole in the ground with a water hose next to it and into the parking lot. If you didn’t know what you were looking for you could easily think that this was just another entrance to the parking lot by the bay. We however were on the look out and saw another RV leaving that location as we pulled up. Then there we were, at the hole in the ground. We had purchased and prepped all necessary equipment and so we began.

First, we hooked up the black water hose (which is actually as disgusting as I thought it would be), then we placed the open end into the hole in the ground that has a huge rock near it. I guess you can put the rock on the hose to keep it from moving? Unsure, we did not use the rock. We opened the valve and out poured our black water. Keep in mind that this was actually grey water for us, so naturally there was no smell. After that was done we attached this “thingy” to our hose and we brought that through the window of the RV and I fed it DOWN into the toilet. The purpose of this “thingy”, which has a name of course I just don’t know it, is to spray water all over the inside of the black water tank. It will get off any toilet paper or icky-ness that sticks to the walls. This is important because then the sensors can work properly. (Oh yes, there are sensors that let us know how full all of our tanks are –very important so we know when to eliminate.) After rinsing the toilet from inside the RV, we close the black water valve and open the grey one. The obvious reason for this order is that the grey can further rinse the icky-ness from the hose. Anyways, about 10 mins of clean up and washing and drying our stuff and we were off. No mess no fuss. Easy Breezy. :)

I will say though that the 2 men who were eliminating after us smelled so so so so bad that I now understand why it’s called a dump station. IT WAS SO BAD! Gross, I know!