Getting Into Victoria Campground-Life Routine

We are in our seventh 4-day shift (with four days off between shifts) and settling into a routine.  Both of us are wondering what we have gotten ourselves into.  We are feeling the full effect of 15.5 hour days in the gatehouse with no option for either of us to leave the park at any time during the four days on duty.  It pretty much takes the entire four days off to do everything that needs to be done so that you can be on duty for the next four days.  We are working on streamlining this operation so that we can have some fun-time on our days off.

When we took this campground everyone that had been around for awhile told us how lucky we were to get such a "good" campground.  Lots of families they said, nice people they said, rarely any problems they said.  Let us tell you, it was anything but for our first six shifts.  People were rude, mean-spirited, obnoxious, cheaters and swindlers.  The parade of society's ills seemed endless and we were on the verge of turning in our park keys and terminating the contract.  Of all the campgrounds we have done and thousands of campers we have met none were even close to as a miserable bunch as these people coming to Victoria Campground on Lake Allatoona.

Plus there was the crush of back-to-back holidays.  We had two weeks of spring break, Easter and Mother's Day.  The campground was essentially booked full for a month and a half.  And if being fully booked wasn't enough, almost every camper was a local, coming 10 miles or less.  This means that they all had family come stay with them and then visitors each day they were camping.  This COE location has the highest number of people allowed per site of anywhere we have worked at 8 people per site.  Sometimes our registered population would approach 400, that's way too many for this little campground.

We hope we don't jinx it by saying something but our last shift, the Memorial Holiday, was a completely different experience.  People were nice, friendly, patient, pleasant to talk to, everything opposite of what we had been gutting out in previous weeks.  If it stays like this things will be pretty good except for the hours.

This post was pretty much a belly-aching session but it is true to our experience.  We hope that things keep looking up and we have more fun things to write about in the next posts.