We went to Chain O Lakes State Park on the Friday of Labor Day weekend to camp with Mom & Dad and one of the families we camped with growing up. We camped with Bil & Cindy and both of their children’s families (Wes & Anita and Carrie & Jeff). I hadn’t seen Wes and Carrie since 1984 when they were little tykes and I was in college. We had 5 campsites all located together and congregated at Carrie and Jeff’s site in the evenings to enjoy Jeff’s massive campfires (he, Bill, and Wes bring several trees worth of firewood).
Jeff’s Fire
The campground is very large (over 400 sites). The sites were built for campers built in the 70’s so they aren’t very long and definitely not level. We needed to jack our back end up quite a bit so I placed a stack of yellow jack blocks under our rear hydraulic jacks. Beth (aka, “Bubbles”) started leveling the RV and once she got the rear end lifted enough I walked away to see if Dad needed any help. Unfortunately, that was a mistake. While I was gone, the rear of the yellow jack blocks started sinking into the ground placing the bases of the hydraulic jacks at a significant angle. Dad didn’t need any help and as I started walking back to our camper I noticed the blocks sinking and started heading to the front of the camper to tell Beth to raise the rear jacks, but it was too late. The rear jacks slid off the jack blocks quite violently making an extremely loud thud! It totally freaked Beth out because she was afraid I was still under the camper aligning the yellow jack blocks. I was certain we had destroyed our very expensive hydraulic jacks. Fortunately the driver side jack landed solidly, but on the passenger side the base of the jack that holds the return springs slipped off and the jack slammed several inches into the ground. I thought sure it was ruined, but I dug out all the dirt around it and was able to push the jack back up into the cylinder using a pry bar.
Once I got the jack pried back up, I went back in the camper to change out of my “going to town clothes”. When I came back out I could see two feet sticking out from under our camper and our friend Bill said, “Brian, this is my son-in-law Jeff (under the camper)”. I said, “I can’t see him, but I already like him”. Jeff and I were able to pull and pry the springs and base plate back under the bottom of the jack and the jack now seems to work fine. In order to provide more stability I dug out my home made ramps and drove the rear of the RV up onto them. We then placed numerous 2″ x 12″ boards under the rear jacks and leveled them with 2″ x 4″s before placing the yellow jack blocks on top. At that point we were stable for the weekend.
Chain O Lakes SP – Site #261 
Rear Jack Engineering
After that we had a great weekend. We cooked our meals over the fire (hotdogs, pork burgers, and hamburgers). On Saturday Beth and I hiked “Trail #6” which was a nice trail and ended up being 4.25 miles by the time we got back to our campsite. On Sunday, my sister Deb came by (her husband Roger was sick) and brought us delicious pulled pork that she had been cooking in a crock-pot for over 24 hours. It was delicious!