Our time in Lone Pine was filled with adventure. We experienced excitement in many different forms throughout our stay. Some of that excitement was good, some of it, not so good...

We survived the bath we gave Leah upon our arrival, we found a sense of freedom as we went off-roading near the Alabama Hills and we endured a great deal of stress and frustration as we attempted to go fishing in our black tank.

For those of you not familiar with campers, the blank tank is the tank that collects the waste from the toilet. As you can imagine, this is not a tank you want to go fishing around in. Sadly, we spend about an entire day doing just that.

At some point during our trip, I was cleaning the toilet and had a very bad “oops” moment. The toilet doesn’t have a lot of water sitting in the toilet bowl so in order to clean off the brush I had to step on the foot lever that flushes the toilet and hold the brush in the hole where the water sprays. While doing this, I twisted the brush around to make sure it was all clean and that’s when it happened...I had a butterfingers incident occur.

It all happened so fast and so slow all at the same time. It was so strange, I couldn’t even believe it. The brush slipped from my fingers, falling into the hole and out of sight. It was a perfect fit right down the pipe. 

This is the only moment in my life that I can remember where I actually caught myself off guard and just stood there, jaw dropped to the floor completely baffled by what I had just done. I just stared at the hole, completely dazed by what had happened, knowing that it was not good.

After what felt like an eternity of wishing I could reverse the clock and undo what happened, I slowly made my way out to the kitchen where Ryan was sitting, with my tail between my legs, praying he would not be mad at me.

I told him about the incident, feeling such shame, not knowing how awful this might turn out to be. When he heard what I did, his face mirrored my initial reaction. His jaw hit the floor. He just stared at me, completely dumbfounded by what I just told him. When he spoke he asked, “are you serious?”

He didn’t need to ask the question because he could see the truth in the shame that was spilling out of me. He went to the toilet, stepped on the pedal to open the drain and looked down to see if the brush was in sight.

It was pitch black down the drain, we were hesitant about using the flashlights on our phones to provide enough lighting to possible get a sense as to how far down the brush had fallen. We didn’t want to lose our phones into the feces vortex!

We knew getting the brush out would be a challenge that couldn’t be ignored because eventually it would get caught in the drain that leads from the tank to the septic, preventing us from completely draining it. If we can’t drain the tank, then eventually we can’t use the toilet...

We weren’t sure how to go about correcting this mistake so jumped on to the internet to hear if other people have had this problem and how they went about fixing it. We found a few forums where people talk about having the same issue occur. 

From my research, I saw that there was a common denominator involved with this situation. Most of the posts on the forums I read, stated comments such as “my wife dropped the toilet brush down the toilet!” I told Ryan my takeaway from my reading is not how to fish out the brush, but that husbands need to learn how to clean the toilet so the wives don’t always have to do it!

I also found some pretty common sense suggestions for prevention of this matter. Some people recommended adding a string around the brush that you loop around your wrist so if it slips out of your fingers it’s still attached to you. We had planned on doing just that so we wouldn’t risk a second occurrence, but the toilet brush we ended up getting to replace the original I had dropped is slightly too large to fit all the way down the drain now.

While reading suggestions, we came across many different solutions for this problem. Some people said they went fishing down the drain in an attempt to pull the brush back up. Some were successful, others were not. For those who were not successful, they had to hire a plumber that specializes in RVs to help open up the black tank to unclog the brush from the drain. We really didn’t want to do this. We had no idea how much that could end up costing. 

We weren’t sure how long this problem would take to correct so we hoped we could at least make it to the location of my first contract where we could dedicate enough time to finding a solution without interrupting our travels. So we continued on our journey, hoping we could put it off.

As we continued to make our way west, we were fortunate to be able to make it a couple of weeks without it preventing us from dumping, however as we approached Lone Pine, we were starting to notice difficulties occurring with the dumping process. We were afraid that if we put it off much longer, it would turn into a bigger problem so we decided to use one of the days at Lone Pine to look into solving this problem.

We began the day with Ryan removing the toilet so we could get a better look into the drain and we dug out our headlamps so we could have light without worrying about losing another object down the drain.

We were pleasantly surprised to see the brush wedged into the pipe close to the top of the drain. Unfortunately, it was out of reach for both of us. We both tried reaching our arms down the drain to see if we could reach it, but the pipe was too narrow that we couldn’t reach down past our forearms without risking getting stuck. It was quite a disgusting task, to blindly reach our arms down a drain that fecal matter has passed through… ICKKK

We decided we needed reinforcements so we drove into town to go to the hardware store, in hopes of finding something that would aid in our messy project. Lone Pine is a very small town with very few stores and the stores they do have are very small. We found a couple of objects that we hoped would do the trick.

(While in town, we stopped at a hiking store and the guy who worked there informed us of Alabama Hills. We were so grateful that we decided to stop in because without the suggestion we would have missed out on the fun adventures we had there! I choose to believe everything happens for a reason and I think that was the reason we had to deal with the toilet brush falling in the toilet. Without this incident, we might not have needed to go into town.)

After exploring the town, we went back home to finish our daunting task. We tried multiple items to pull the brush back up the drain: plumbing snake, tongs, string, jar lifter. We weren’t having any luck. The plumbing snake reached and helped to clean some of the poop in the area so we could access the brush better, but the grabber on it was too small and weak to keep hold as we tried to lift it. The tongs reached but once in the drain, we couldn’t open them enough to grip the handle of the brush. The jar grabber fit and was able to open wide enough to grip the brush, but wasn’t long enough! We were getting frustrated but were determined to finish what we started.

We use the string to make a lasso. When in the wild west, you take a note from the cowboys.

We took the lasso and tried to drape it over the handle of the brush and pull it up. Each time we pulled it up, it would slip out of the string and fall. After SEVERAL attempts, I was finally able to get the string over the handle, carefully pulled the string tight to get a good grip that hopefully wouldn’t drop it again, and slowly lifted the brush out of the pipe.

It was the most frustrating claw machine game we have ever played. And the prize at the end was really stinky. But mission accomplished, we succeeded.

Now it was time to shower for the next 3 hours!