Long, Long Day

I made a fairy garden in a flower pot. Can you see the gnome at the door?

They even have a well to get water when they need it! Not lately, though. Plenty of water keeps falling from the sky.

My most favorite part of this little garden is the tiny "Eddie dog"! A gift from kamper Stacy. She knows how much I love my fur babies. See him on the "gravel" by the travel trailer, just beyond the fairies on the see-saw. They even have a good supply of firewood for s'mores. Gotta have s'mores when you camp!

Memorial Day weekend is here. All week long I have fielded phone calls. Wednesday brought 11 cancellations for various reasons. One man proclaimed he could not be here because the Missouri River is cresting. I am not close to the river, nor any body of water that would cause flooding. We are on a knoll of sorts and we get wet when it rains, just like everyone else, but we do not flood. 

I filled all 11 spots with campers just hoping to find a spot, then 3 called back and cancelled. Yesterday my phone rang every two minutes from 7 am until around 4 pm. No exaggeration! I have no sites left to rent and I now hate the phone! This morning a man called "to check on my reservation". I asked what he needed to know and he said he just wanted to check and make sure it was still here. "Did you call in and cancel it?" I asked. No was his reply. I checked and found his reservation still on the books and assured him that he still has a reservation. Can't wait to meet this guy.

It started yesterday with those folks lucky enough to be able to get a jump on the revelry. Unfortunately, they all seemed to show up at the same time. HeWho drives had my car, getting new tires. His transmission died in his truck and he was driving my car the day before and had a flat tire. He says he was doing this for me ….. I really could have used some help here and I won't be going anywhere for the for the weekend, so why this needed to be done on a day when we both knew it would be busy is beyond me. 

I plowed through it, answering the phone and checking in campers without incident …. I thought. We have maps of the park. Pretty good ones, easy to read. And I always highlight the path to the site. I try to always talk to the driver and have been known to tell them to pay attention when I highlight that path. I speak clearly and enunciate and use terms easily understood. 

Sometimes the driver will dispatch his wife to check-in and wait for her in the RV. These women will ask questions to make sure they know exactly how reach the site. I call them the navigators. Sometimes the drivers ignore the navigators. And, of course that happened yesterday. Big motorhome towing a pick-up truck decided to go his own way and took out about five railroad ties. Three were caught up under his RV and the truck was up on another one. Kamper Sharon saw him turning the wrong way and yelled and tried to stop him, but until a man told him to stop, he just kept on going.

We put the railroad ties there to keep vehicles off the soggy grass and prevent them from getting stuck. I arrived after kampers Terry and Craig were helping get the ties from under the RV. The man's wife was frazzled and said she tried to tell him he was going the wrong way. Then she said she needed a stiff drink, but that she is not a drinker. I understood her sentiments.

It is noon now and I have already checked in 4 campers (check-out is noon, therefore check-in is anytime after noon). Two of them came to tell me that they did not like the sites I put them in and wanted to move. I might have been a little witchy, since I am booked solid, but I did some magic rearranging and managed to keep my thoughts in my head and not let them come out my mouth.

It is going to be a long, long day. I am getting far too old for this.