Camp Hosting at Chattahoochee Bend - Same-Same

We have been campground hosts at Chattahoochee Bend State Park (Georgia) going on a year now.  For a volunteer position this is a long time, most volunteer host jobs are three months with a long gig maybe stretching to six months.  A year is especially long when your hosting duties include daily bath house cleaning.  Which in this case means about 2,000 square feet of toilets, showers, sinks and floors that have to be scrubbed, mopped and disinfected every day.

Then there is the seven months of growing season when the campground has to be mowed every week.  There is about 11 acres of surface that has to be mowed in campground #1.  This is not to say that all of that acreage is vegetated.  There is a lot of bare, red Georgia clay between clumps of grass.  Chatt Bend is a relatively new park and it has a long way to go before all the bulldozered campsite building is fully revegetated.

In an attempt to cover some of the bare clay, we put down over 150 lbs of grass seed.
Putting down the seed was easy, raking it in was the work.

But in the mean-time this means "suiting up" to mow with the big zero turn mower.  Hard-toe shoes, army fatigue pants with cinches at the ankles, a long-sleeved denim shirt, wide-brimmed hat, wrap-around sunglasses, ear plugs, and dust mask.  The mower has to be retrieved from the maintenance barn and driven the one mile to the campground and then you don't stop for the next four to five hours it takes to get the campground groomed.

This guy greeted us on our last trip to the maintenance barn to get the mower.
He is using up a little more than half of the ten foot wide lane.

Then there is the next four hours it takes to use the string trimmer and leaf blower to put the finishing touches on.  The combination of heat, humidity, sweat and giant clouds of red dust coats every square inch of you in a cake of powder.  You look like a primitive person that has covered themselves in mud for camouflage.  Despite all the covering up with clothing, it is still a chore showering out all that clay from the places it manged to creep into.

For a normal volunteer time of three months none of this would have been a big deal but after a full year, it is starting to wear on us.  The park has asked us to stay even longer but we're going to pass on the offer and spend the summer of 2016 on "vacation".  If you have followed this blog you have seen several times my reasoning for agreeing to such a long stay in one spot in the first place.  Our first grandchild was born in Dec of 2014 in Atlanta.  Chatt Bend was the closest possible place we could get to be near at just a little over an hours drive.  So we have thoroughly enjoyed our time with the grand-baby and being with her through and a little beyond her first birthday.

Our last day will be May 31st, on June 1st we will start a trek west to Texas.  We have each had 4 jury summons'.  Our home county, Polk, has been great to work with.  With each summons (which we received in the mail about a week after we were supposed to appear) we just called the courthouse and told them that we were out of the state.  They would immediately ask if we were Escapees and when I told them that we are, they replied; "No problem, just come in and serve the next time you are in town."  So that is what we will do.  We will get a look at the inside of the legal system of Polk County, hopefully we won't end up on a long, drawn out trial.

We also have family in Conroe, Montgomery and Sugarland, all within an hour or two of Rainbow's End Escapees Park in Livingston, our home park.  We hope to get around see as many as we can and then start a migration north that will land us in the panhandle (a little town north of Amarillo) in early July.

Come on June 1st!