That was a tough weekend.

Mondays through Fridays are not bad around here, but on a nice sunny weekend things get pretty hectic.

Especially when you have to deal with drunks, belligerent sober people, and people who don't seem to know how to use either a toilet or a trash can. Ah, the end of the weekend was a very welcome thing indeed!

Friday night was not bad. Other than our typical problem of people making too much noise past quiet hours, it was pretty uneventful.

"Quiet hours" are from 11pm to 7am. I give people an extra little time to settle down...I'm not going to go around at 11:05pm being the noise policeman. So I wait until midnight and then take a walk. Two different sites had to be told. But I do it in a jovial manner. First I explain the "quiet" doesn't mean silent. They are welcome to stay up as long as they aren't being loud enough to bother their neighbor. So, quiet voices are fine. Then, I tell them that I need to do some gas powered weed whacking and grass cutting around their site at 7am, but I can put that off if I don't receive any complaints. The vast majority of cases are settled right there!

Saturday night was good, except one of the same sites from Friday night had to be told again. Other than that, things seemed good, and I went to bed just after midnight.

At least I thought it was good.

But in the morning, Ruth came back from checking the washrooms and said that she had been told about some trouble. It seems some young people came into the campground well after midnight, found themselves one of the two empty sites and set their tents up. Then, they proceeded to get drunk. And of course, the more they drank, the louder they got.

One of our ex board members has a seasonal site right next door to where these guys were doing there thing. It apparently couldn't have been THAT bad, or he would have come to get me.

But, there were some complaints, so I went down around 9:00am to go have a talk with the offenders. But they were still sleeping, apparently having not gone to bed until 5:30am or so from what I heard from one of the complainers. That site was booked for someone else yesterday night, so they had to vacate the site by 11:00am. I gave them until 10:00am and then went and woke them up.

It took some effort. I had to shake the tent and be pretty vocal to get any response out of them. At first I thought nobody was there! Eventually, a couple of skinny kids exited, one of them swearing with every second word. They were still drunk...one of them could hardly stand up!

So I told them they had to leave their site by 11:00am. Turns out there were also two girls with them who had been sleeping in the cars! I hadn't even noticed them until they got out.

Make a long story short, they didn't exit their site until 12:05pm. They simply couldn't function. Then, we had to try and get them to pay their bill. They had two cars, and one wouldn't start. I had to boost him. But we were afraid they would simply drive away without paying, so I said I would boost them only after they paid their bill.

Of course some of the nearby campers are watching this whole circus taking place. I think I handled things pretty good because they could easily have gotten out of control. They paid their bill and ended up going to the day use area and sleeping on the beach. They sobered up there and then I had to boost one of their cars again. This time, they were apologetic and shook my hand. A couple of kids, who simply can't handle their booze.

Later that day I was up in the overflow area and driving around the circular one way lane that goes around the sites. I stopped, got out to talk to one of the campers, and just left the truck running. I was literally 5 seconds away from the truck. Five seconds later later, a guy pulls up behind and honks his horn right away and yells at me to move the truck. I walk over towards him and tell him to relax, I was only going to be a minute and he says "well, you can't just park in the middle of the road and block everybody". I tell him I'm the park manager and I was on park business. His buddies laugh at him, and you can tell this doesn't go over well. By this time I'm walking back to my truck, and I drive through to the exit, although I did so very slowly. Just to annoy him a little more.

At the exit, he pulls up beside me and snarls "You better watch yourself because I'm gonna break you in *&$#%*(%^ two!"

In my younger days, I might have stepped out of my truck. But I'm too old (and a little wiser) for that crap now. So I simply laughed at him at said "yep, you probably could". And drove away.

Seriously? This guy was only a couple of years younger than me and he got that bent out of shape because someone inconvenienced him for 30 seconds of his day. Relax, buddy!

Ruth's day didn't go much better. Between cleaning up human excrement outside of the toilets and then keeping the insides clean, she's just about had enough. And left over diapers on the beach and paper plates and trash that you almost can't keep up with.

It was one of those weekends where you think that it's almost NOT worth the money they are paying us. Hopefully we won't have many more like that, although I expect by the end of the season we'll have seen just about everything.

To end this on a better note, while I was standing in the office for a minute, a guy was checking out and he said this was one of his best camping experiences ever and that he enjoyed our hospitality. He looked directly at me and thanked me personally and said that he and his family can't wait to come back.

As we've said, 95% of the people who come here are absolutely great. But it's that other 5%....