New Position on Lake Allatoona

It is done.  We have moved from Cooper's Furnace Day Use Area (as volunteer gate attendants) to Victoria Campground (as contractor park attendants).  It will be a couple of weeks before the campground is open to the public so we are just cooling our jets until our five day training session starts next week.

This campground is operated by two sets of hosts.  Our co-hosts are a really nice couple that live in a town west of the campground, almost all the way over to the place where we spent the winter in Carrollton, GA.  They will be living in their motor home in the campground while on duty and driving home (about an hour away) on their days off.  This will be their 8th year as park attendants at this campground so we will have some good, solid experience to draw on as we get through our first few days on duty and learn the routine.

The host's campsites are on either side of the entrance to the campground, flanking the gatehouse.  They are marked as A and B.  We are in the B-site and it is deep (about an 80' driveway) and densely wooded.

PAC (Park Attendant Contractor) Site B.
Nestled deep into some thick woods with lots of space between it and any other camp site.

The sky is not even remotely visible (except in the opposite direction) so there will be no satellite signal making its way to our roof mounted satellite dish.  We are going to have to go to plan B for site B.  The same can be said for cell phone connections.  Even as populated as this place is, cell towers are not close enough to be of much use.  Most of the time our phones are displaying a signal strength of one bar and 1X.  No 3G or LTE at all.  Having a voice connection is not possible and transmitting data is ultra slow or non-existent.  Our jetpack is useless at this point.

Luckily there is a commercial wifi signal blasting our way from the marina across the road.  They offer unlimited data at three speeds.  We are going to try the 6 mbs and see if it is good enough to stream video so that we will have some way to get local news and weather while waiting for the solution to our satellite connection.  We found a satellite dish installer but the closest one is more than an hour away, near our old house in Johns Creek.  Business must be good because he is booked solid.  He has agreed to come out to our location "after hours" in about a week barring no unforeseen difficulties with his existing schedule.  The wifi speed we chose is going to run us $50/month but in addition to being able to do our email, banking, bill paying and streaming video, we will also be able to configure our phones for VoIP (phone calls through the internet).  If the wifi signal holds up we should be pretty well set for our communication needs.

We have a few days to explore our new surroundings before training starts on Thursday of next week (that will be March 16, 2017) so that is just what we are going to do plus get in some time with the grand baby.  She is now only thirty minutes away, it is no longer a major production or diesel guzzling operation, we can just drop in on a whim.  Not sure how our daughter and son-in-law feel about that but we are sure liking it.