Stupid, Stupid, Stupid...and I ought to know better!!

[naganthunter]

I ENCOURAGE EVERYONE TO POST A DUMB MOVE THAT THEY'VE MADE SO THAT WE CAN ALL LEARN FROM IT!!!!

OK, so I did something stupid.  REALLY stupid.  

I

[brainpause]

Great points.

Unless you have comorbidities (such as heart failure or kidney disease), urine color is a GREAT way to watch your hydration status. You should drink enough fluids to keep your urine PALE yellow. I alternate 1 bottle of Propel with 1 bottle of water, to avoid hyponatremia (too low sodium).

Another good rule of thumb is to drink a cup of fluid every 15 minutes during physical activity. It is sometimes hard, but you'll feel better.

Larry

[austinado16]

Oh man!  Thanks for sharing that and I'm glad it turned out good in the end.

I'm big on the water drinking.  Not at home during normal life, but once we get doing something, then I ramp it up alot.  For real serious stuff we buy a keg of "Cytomax" that cyclists use when training/racing.  Fantastic stuff.  We drank it exclusively on our hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back out.  Even rescued a gal who'd come down in with her bf, and a 16oz bottle of water.  They were 1-1/2mi down in from the top, it was 100F and she was run out of sugar, salt and liquid.  I poured her off 16oz from my pack, made her drink it, and within about 10min the lights came back on, and spooled back up.  Pretty amazing transformation.

As far as stupid stories go: I have a laundry list, and so far have managed to outlive all of them......including flying a big model airplane that flew on 60' of steel cable, into some high tension power lines and living to tell about it.  Have a couple of real nice electric burn scars on my right hand where 7,600 volts entered as it blew through the flight control handle, and a matching one in my right big toe where it blew 1" hole out of my sock (to match the hole in the side of my toe), out my shoe, and into the ground.

[dthurk]

Most recent...
 
 DD and I were driving to Shenandoah National Park 2 weeks ago.  We left home at 6:00 PM with a Dodge Durango towing a 28' TT.  Our destination was the Luray Walmart for an overnight, then we'd hop over the mountain in the morning to the SNP campground at Big Meadows.  About midnight, I reached the I81 exit to Luray.  In between was the Massanutten mountain range.  I had plugged in the latitude and longitude coordinates into our GPS navigator to get us to the Walmart.  We climbed mountains for a significant time when the GPS told us to make a left turn.  As the headlights came around, I found myself looking down a narrow one-lane road.  I immediately began looking for a place to turn around.  There was nothing.  We continued to climb on very tight switchbacks.  There were no houses, driveways, intersections, nothing at all.  The road was narrow enough that I would not be able to turn the Durango around, let alone the full rig.  We continued driving, one mile...two.  The low gas warning light came on.  At about 3 miles we come across a VERY SMALL U shaped area to the left side of the road.  I stopped, got out and walked the U.  I didn't think we could make it, but told DD we were turning around NOW.  I did make it, I may have jackknifed the camper to do it.  It was about the most extreme turn I've ever made with the camper.  I didn't dare look in the mirror at the camper.  We did get to the Walmart about 20 minutes later, there was a gas station right next to it.  I slept soundly till morning.  
 
 The SPUT?  (Well, it wasn't a pop up)  STTT?  The coordinate format I entered was different than what the GPS was expecting.  If I had changed the format, I would have been fine.  Later, I found out from a local that we  had turned onto a fire road.  There was nothing up there.  I didn't ask him if the road went somewhere or just ended.

[austinado16]

Youza!  Bet it was getting hot in the cab!

[dthurk]

Youza!  Bet it was getting hot in the cab!

Naw, just opened the window and let the cool air in.  I wasn't real happy thinking of backing that rig down 3 miles of narrow road.  

DD was asleep when I made the turn.  She woke up and blurted out "Where ARE we?".  Then "There's a Walmart out here?".

It made for an interesting night, anyway.

[TheViking]

So basically, if I'm camping, drinking beer etc.....and i wake up the next morning, go to the bathroom, and my urine is actually glowing...that's not a good thing.

[brainpause]

So basically, if I'm camping, drinking beer etc.....and i wake up the next morning, go to the bathroom, and my urine is actually glowing...that's not a good thing.

Yeah, you might then consider moving your campsite away from the power plant.



Larry

[butterflyfish]

Thanks for sharing... Here's our's

It was our very first camping trip.  We were getting packed up older DS was ticked off that we had to leave and was misbehaving something awful.  Younger DS was miserable and was still afraid of bugs (he has since gotten much better about the bugs) and would scream everytime a bug came by him.  So DH puts the kids in the car with a DVD on and we finish securing the PUP.  Younger DS was strapped in his car seat.  Older DS was sitting in his booster watching TV.  Well, we were taking a lot longer than we should have and just as I was picking up the chocks, I hear older DS saying "bye, bye, bye," in a pretty bratty way to his brother, that in hindsight I should have know something was about to happen.  

Not thinking anything of it I go to put the chocks in the van and realize that older DS locked the doors with younder brother strapped in the carseat,  :yikes: the keys in the ignition (car off... luckily it was mid March not hot and we were parked under a tree), my purse and cell phone (with the AAA info) sitting on the front seat.  Luckily DH had his cell, though the battery was reading one bar.  After finding a fellow camper who had AAA I called them and told them the child was locked in the car so they put it in as priority.  Oh and I forgot to mention I had forgotten the spare key at home (we almost never travel anywhere with only one set of keys!).  So we wait and wait and older DS at this time is in a heap of trouble.  Then we hear the fire engine sirens.  DH says "Did you call the fire department?"  "No," I say, "I called AAA."  he says "Those sirens are for us."  I say "No I called AAA!"  Sure enough the fire engine pulls up a few sites away from us and asks the man something.  I see the man point to us.  Yep, it was for us.  Apparently since there was a child in the car, AAA called emergency services.  And to make it worse, in SC when there is a call, usually the entire fire station goes so that if there is another call while they are out, they can all go to that one.  So, 3 firemen get out of the truck.  They have the lock picking tools, but inform me they are not professional theives so it might take a minute.  They also say we could always break the glass.  I tell them that if it were hotter and the van wasn't under a tree, we would have broken the glass a long time ago.  I also forgot to mention that because the fire turck was there, the entire cg section came out of their shells to find out what was going on.   The firemen couldn't get the door open, but about 5 minutes later the locksmith pulls up tells the firemen to "move over and let me show you how it's done."  Pops the lock in seconds, flat and DS is out of the car.  

Lessons learned:
NEVER NEVER NEVER travel with one set of keys again (like I said we almost always have 2 sets, but now we make sure we have both sets)

Keep cell phone and spare set of keys OUTSIDE the TV until all is packed up and one of us is in the car.

Your car is certainly not as secure as you might think... that locksmith had the door open in mere seconds and it would have been faster if he hadn't stopped to tell the firemen to watch him!  Had he been a theif he would have been in the car much faster than that... So now we also never leave anything that is of any value in the car.

I am happy to report that both DS have gotten better now that they know we will be going camping more than just once and they now help pack up and set up...
Another good thing is that the new TV has a keyless code to unlock the doors so as long as DH keeps the code in his wallet (and his wallet on him) or we commit it to memory, we won't have this problem again.

[John Madill]

i always carry a spare car key in my wallet, and have a 2nd spare key duct taped to the back of the front license plate.

and for locked spare tires on my trailers i duct tape a key on the trailer tongue out of sight.

[butterflyfish]

Until this time, we had always taken our two sets of keys.  Because the keys to that van have the keyless entry clicker on them, I couldn't easily (or cheaply) get a key made... I tried at the hardware store and they told me I needed to go to the dealer or a  locksmith.  Do we are stuck with just the two.  I am also paranoid about keeping a key attached to the car.  I am sure that paranoia comes from having a father who was born and raised in the Bronx, NY.  

[SpeakEasy]

Since I've been camping most of my 54 years, I could certainly write a book of stupid. But here's one that makes me cringe even today.

We were getting parked at a campsite in Grand Teton NP. The sites are pretty small there, and this one was JUST wide enough for our rig. It was raised up several feet from the surrounding scrub. I had the pup almost where I wanted it, but I needed a little bit more adjustment. I had been backing and turning and backing for quite a while and still didn't have it where I wanted it. This is where I started with the stupid: I unhitched, and thought I could more easily complete the final adjustments by hand. Now this rig has a tongue weight of around 300 lbs, and the overall weight is a bit over 2,000 lbs. In the gravel, I couldn't budge the tongue jack wheel. Here's where it gets really stupid: I told the wife and daughters to go back and stand on the back bumper so that their weight would lighten my tongue weight. With them back there I was able to get the tongue jack wheel to move a bit. But - there was a slope to this site, and once the trailer started to move, it got some help from mother nature. I had to run back and get a wheel chock in place before the rig ran away from me. It really didn't move far or fast, but when I think of what COULD have happened, I get a little green around the gills.

-Speak

[austinado16]

Ooh, that reminds me of mine from last year in Kings Canyon Nat'l Park:  Tight site, had to do a little jacknife to get the camper in at about a 45 degree angle to the TV.  There was an area just large enough for the camper, and then the site dropped off very steeply.  Steeply as in, you had a hard time walking up and down it!

I didn't have the wheel chocks in place because I was wasn't thinking.  Started cranking the tongue wheel down, tongue comes up off the ball and the camper starts rolling backward away from the truck!!!!!!! :yikes:   And then KA-WANG, the safety chains did their thing. :-()

So now I'm well schooled in the subtle art of wheel chock deployment

[naganthunter]

...YIKES!!! :yikes:

[campdaddy]

Until this time, we had always taken our two sets of keys.  Because the keys to that van have the keyless entry clicker on them, I couldn't easily (or cheaply) get a key made... I tried at the hardware store and they told me I needed to go to the dealer or a  locksmith.  Do we are stuck with just the two.  I am also paranoid about keeping a key attached to the car.  I am sure that paranoia comes from having a father who was born and raised in the Bronx, NY.  

The key to our Durango also has the fob for the keyless entry. I still had a "spare" key made at Walmart for it anyway that I carry in my wallet. It will still work to unlock the vehicle (manually) but it won't start it and it WILL set off the alarm system. But hey, that's still better than having the fire dept. show up.