October To Date

It's been a busy month for us.  We've been working about 5- 6 days a week depending on what's going on.  We're back into the swing of things and now things will change again - scheduling wise.  Bob, our maintenace person, hurt his back.  When he went to the doctor he found out that he has degenerative bone disease.  He's now back to work about 3 days a week and limited in what he can do.  Sure miss him a lot.   Can't believe how much he really did for us.

KOA has two awards they hand out to campgrounds if they meet certain criteria.  We exceeded and earned the first award, "President's Award".  To get the next one, you need extremely high survey results from the campers that stay with us.  This campground has never received this award, "Founders Award" due to low survey results due to the trains.  We get comments like: the campground is great, the staff is awesome, but the train whistles are annoying.  Well, this year we got the Founders Award.  Diane & Scott, will be called on stage during the KOA convention (for owners) to receive it.  In honor of all of our hard work, they took the entire staff and their spouses, guests, etc out for dinner to a high end restaurant.  We had a separate room all to our selves.

A few pictures from our dinner.

Lynn, Becky and Becky's daughter, Ariel.

Forgot to take pictures of our dinner until after we started eating.  The presentation of the food was so spectacular -sorry we didn't think of it before we ate half of our meal.

This was Sharon's meal.  She had Chilean Sea Bass with lobster sauce; risotto; seafood puff pastry and grilled asparagus.  She didn't even offer me a bite and she ate the WHOLE thing.

Here's my dinner: mashed potatoes; steak; green beans and covered with a red wine & cheese sauce.  The garnish on top was string potatoes.

Last Saturday, the 13th, we had the possibility of a thunderstorm.  Well, no rain by the time we closed at 7:30pm.  But before 9pm the sirens started.  There was a tornado sighted just 5 miles to the north of us.  Just across the interstate.  Then the winds and rain came.  Unbelieveable.  We opened up the office and stayed there for safety.  However, we couldn't get hold of all of our guests, so I went out on the golf cart and picked up a few people and brought them back to the office.  Talk about looking like a drowned rat.  The warning was over by 9:15 and everyone started trooping back to their campers.  We were walking through the place to lock up again and noticed water was pooring in under the doors.  We went outside to find 4 inches of water at least surrounding the sides and back of the office.  Well, Sharon, Lynn, Jim and I started getting rid of the water.  No time for pictures.  You'll just have to use your imagination.  Jim took the big pump and started pumping the water away from the building.  Lynn and Sharon manned the shop vac to get major portions of the water.  For the smaller areas inside the store area, I was using the mop.  We were greatful for the larger shop vac.  We emptied at least 6 times.

The next day, we used the carpet cleaner to suck the water out of the carpet.  Diane & Scott got back from St. Louis around 1pm on Sunday and they tore up the carpets.  Well, that was our excitement last weekend.

We were off on Thursday this week, so after running errands Sharon went out and took some pictures of the fall leaves here in the campground.  It was such a beautiful sunny day.

We still have quite a few trees that are green but the colors are just so beautiful this year.  With the winds that we've been having the last couple of days, a lot of leaves are falling.

This picture is of our fall decorations in front of the building.

I love this next scene.  The trees along the railroad tracks are all green except for this one section.  It's just so pretty looking at it all day.

The next month will be very busy.  Diane & Scott leave next Tuesday or Wednesday and won't be back until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.  Schedules will be kind of odd while they're gone but at least we are working with some great people.