24 August '08
Sunday
We’re sitting here tonight watching the closing ceremonies of the Olympics from Beijing and constantly asking ourselves “how are they doing that, or did you see that?”… I’m sure that we’ll be talking about the opening and closing of the Olympics for a long long time… We’ve been very fortunate to have been able to watch just about every event that was broadcast these games and still get all of our work done here at Farragut. It’s hard to believe but we’re into our 3rd week already. The second afternoon we were here we had a surprise visit. CW and Gina came riding up on their bikes. They are the couple that we took over from 2 years ago. You might say that they taught us all we know about “Camp Hosting”… They have the same days off (Monday and Tuesdays) so we started looking for things that we might do together. As it turns out, they have a couple of inflatable kayaks so we immediately started looking for the best time and location to go out for a paddle. But first things first… Back in the early 80’s when we lived in Coeur d’Alene, there was one local event that we really enjoyed going too…”Art On The Green”.
Joelle and Amy called and let us know that they were on their way so Louise and I jumped in the car and off we went to join them for the day. Art on the Green is a gathering of artists, restaurateurs, small business owners, and musicians of all types. When we started going, you could walk the entire gathering in an hour and 45 minutes or less and still have time to see and enjoy everything. This time it took us well over 4 hours and we didn’t see everything but we sure ate well. Last Tuesday we got together with CW and Gina and headed down to the south end of Lake Coeur d’Alene. There are a number of smaller lakes that have formed off of the Coeur d’Alene River and the St. Joe Rivers and they can be reached by entering Lake Coeur d’Alene and paddling up the St Joe about a mile. Unfortunately, when we woke we found that the sky had turned threatening and looked like we might find ourselves in a heavy downpour. Well we struck out anyway. A little over halfway we were overtaken with the heavy rain that we were hoping to avoid so we turned around and headed back. Seeing as how it was still early morning and we felt that none of us had had enough coffee, we headed off to find a place that would be able to supply our needs. On Thursday Louise went to the Spokane airport to pick-up Lil-Louise and Drew. They flew in from Seattle to spend a few days with us. Of course they were immediately drawn into the work around the campground and for exchange we supply the smores…
Our “assignments” are to sell firewood, rake up the campsite
and clean the picnic tables when the campers check out, and watch over and be around when or if one of the new campers have a question or problem. This is done for 5 days and the next two we are off to do whatever and for all this we get a free site.
To clean/rake a campsite will take the two of us about 7 to 8 minutes and on an average day we will have about 9 sites that will vacate…pretty easy deal. The rest of the days while we are “on”, we can do whatever we want and that includes leaving the area. If we do leave, we let the rangers know and also make arrangements with our neighbor camp-host. This afternoon Larry and Pauline drove out to spend the afternoon with us.
We had a little different morning. We knew Lar and Paul were to be here about 2 but by 1 we still had 4 campers that hadn’t left. Now with check-out being 1 and check-in at 2 we were behind the ball especially if I was to get my shower before they arrived…well it all worked out and we enjoyed the visit.