Memorial Day Weekend is typically the official start of the camping season. People flock to this lake and the surrounding campgrounds in hordes, bringing tents and trailers and boats and motorcycles and every other “toy” imaginable with them. There are kids and bikes and dogs everywhere you look… a constant beehive of activity. Grills fill the air with the smell of wood smoke and meat cooking, music filling the air from different campsites, kids yelling, dogs barking…a somewhat civilized chaos.

Sweetness and light, right? Not all the time it isn’t!

When the sun goes down it becomes a little less civilized. The Conservation Police and site security are constantly on rounds through the campground looking for problems and often finding them after a day spent with perhaps just a little too much beer intake than is good for the normal human liver. It’s as if the fact that it’s a holiday weekend gives a good excuse for pushing the envelope, though I have to say that it hasn’t been all that bad so far this year. For the most part people are behaving fairly well.

Joker and I can now say that we’ve officially survived our first major holiday weekend as campground hosts in fine style. We’ve written permits and answered questions and fielded complaints until we’re blue in the face. We’ve worn out 2 markers and 6 ink pens. We’ve dealt with man-eating baby garter snakes who dare to enter into the sanctuary of the women’s bathhouse. We’ve told countless people that our campground is full… yes we’re sure… contrary to popular belief we can not work magic and add another 300 sites to the campground in 15 minutes just because you chose to wait until late Friday night to come out. We’ve made endless suggestions to campers that perhaps they wouldn’t always be blowing the circuit breaker if they didn’t have everything ON including the air conditioner at the same time. We’ve seen more men who SHOULD be wearing shirts and more women who should be wearing MORE shirt than we can count. We’ve called the sheriff at 1:30 in the morning to break up a fight. We’ve found an emergency vet for a camper. We’ve repeatedly told a camper that you can’t hook up to the water permanently, continuing to be ignored. We’ve sat together in quiet numbness after a camper bombardment. We’ve eaten supper of sorts late at night because there was just no time to fix anything earlier. We’ve shared late night cups of coffee and deep breaths with other hosts at our table while we swap stories of the adventures of our night. And when we go inside at the end of the night, we’ve turned out every light and sat in the quiet so just maybe people might think we weren’t still up and knock on the door at midnight to let us know that people are walking through their yard… as if we all have a property deed for the small space we inhabit temporarily.

And through it all we’ve laughed… because overall, people are laughable.

Besides the fact that if we don’t laugh, we may scream!

All in all it’s been fun AND it’s been interesting…

We’re definitely looking forward to our days off though.