In case you were wondering, running a campground isn’t just about walking the grounds to make certain that everything looks pretty and dusting the merchandise in the store. This time of year it’s more a frantic mix of gardening before the plants get too high (you can’t start this too early because we never know when we’ll get another 6 inches of snow or a deep frost) and lots of office work (on a good day there are many reservations to process and tons of loose ends to keep track of) .
The last couple of days have been very computer intensive. The first project is getting smarter about how we administer Fiber College. Last year we walked blindly through the process of organizing 40 classes and 25 vendor booths…this year we’re trying to have all of our databases inter-relational and create a system that will allow us just to plug in new information each year…so I’m learning MS Access with a book…a creative process that is certainly less tactile-ly gratifying than knitting a sweater from a raw fleece! Learning to mail merge with Access actually lead to the second computer project…mail merging with the database we’ve collected for the campground in order to communicate with guests when special events are in the works.
Now writing letters to folks from a large database is like walking into a huge cocktail party wearing a blindfold. I’m trying to send letters out that are genuinely not spam…you know, they have a purpose and they should only land in mailboxes of folks who have visited our website in the past and written to us for more information. The cocktail party part is that when the letters go out, I can attach some of the names to faces. If they write back and say hi, it’s like someone handing me a champagne cocktail…sort of the lottery of warm fuzzies. When they write back and say…take me off this list…I have to be my grown up self and not feel wounded. That probably sounds easy to you but me, I worry about it for days, especially if I recognize the name. And like anything else in the world, the majority of people never respond at all…and that’s like dropping confetti from an airplane and wondering if anyone was actually on the ground.
But when the day is done, I get to step away from my desk and walk the beach. Yesterday I snapped these photos to show you another glimpse of our world. The sky was overcast and the water very choppy…there’s a storm coming in over the weekend.
The first one in this post is walking towards Moose Point State Park. When some people call they want to know if we’re located on a sandy beach…not really, this is typical mid-coast Maine with sandbars, cobbles and serious rocks…you know, the interesting kind of beach 😉 The second photo is a couple of anchors sitting on the beach, waiting for their boats to come back from storage.
The third photo is in response to people asking if they’re going to be camping right on the beach. Here in mid-coast Maine, the beaches are still relatively young. The land is eroding slowly and so our sites are up above the beach anywhere from a foot to 12 feet. Young beaches means more real rocks waiting to be pulverized by a millennium of wave action.
Finally, the last photo is for Donna. This is a view of the Bay taken from the picnic table on site #30.