Fly in the Ointment

While enjoying our time at Cooper's Furnace Day Use Area our volunteer coordinator's job has changed and now she is the contract liaison for all the campgrounds on Lake Allatoona.  Every since her job change she has been after us to bid on jobs that have come open due to medical issues (most of us campground hosts are old folks and unfortunately medical issues are common).  From our interview for the day use area job she knew that we had been trained in the use of the national reservation system and she was seeing an opportunity to get someone that would need minimal training at this late stage in the process.

We gave in and agreed to place a bid but that meant creating a company, registering the company with Dunn & Bradstreet and cross-registering with the Department of Defense (which is who the Corps of Engineers report to).  The red tape was horrific and took weeks to get certified but we got it done.  In the end we spent a chunk of money to meet everybody's requirements.  Our insurance company about had a cow when they found out that our camper and truck was going to used by someone that was a contractor.  We were required to raise our coverage limits which in turn raised our premium by several hundred dollars.  And on top of that happy news, we are now going to have to file taxes in two states, our home state of Texas and Georgia.

But it is done now and we have submitted a bid to be contract park attendants at Victoria Campground on Lake Allatoona and have been accepted.  We'll stay where we are a few more days until all the paperwork clears the final checks.  For now we have opened Cooper's Furnace and are enjoying light duty.

We are scheduled for a week of training in mid-March and have been given the green light to move into our new park as early as March 10.  The move will be a short one, relocating from the bottom of the dam to a campground about 7 miles up the river channel that forms the lake.  But that is the "as the crow flies" mileage.  To get our cabin on wheels to the new campground it will be a bout a 20 mile meander on arterial roads that feed the neighborhood roads that lead to the campground.

Lake Allatoona is a long, narrow, winding lake.  Our current position,
is Cooper's Furnace, below the dam.  We'll be moving up the lake to
Victoria Campground in a few days.

And that brings up something that is very different about any campground that we have ever hosted, this place is smack in the middle of a densely populated suburb of a metropolitan area.  Our address is associated with the town of Woodstock, GA.  Once upon a time it was a quaint little place that primarily supported a farming community.  But the growth in and around Atlanta since the late 1980's has reached well north of this place.  There are subdivisions pressed right up against the campground property and we share this stretch of shoreline with a COE day use park and a private marina that also has housing on its property.  You would think that that would be a good thing for services like over-the-air TV signals and cell phone signals but noooo.... once again we are in a "dead zone".  It is going to take some work to get connected.

This will be our campground.  Two loops, each with a bath
house and dump station and a total of 75 campsites.

But on the plus side we are within minutes of any kind of shopping and entertainment one would want.  One exception - the local Sonic Drive In is closed for remodeling and probably won't be reopened until after we are gone.  Oh well, it won't be so easy to fall off the diet wagon.