In the RV park where we are volunteer park hosts, campsite occupancy is limited to 8 campers, including children. If a group has nine or more campers in it, an additional site must be rented to accommodate the overflow. Eighteen campers in a group? Three campsites must be rented. Twenty-four campers in a group? Again, three campsites must be rented. Unfortunately, and more often than not, people aren't truthful when they are checking in and telling us how many people are in their group.
Late one Friday night, I stopped a car that was creeping around the campground, obviously looking for a place to camp. I asked the driver if she had reservations, and no, she didn't. Not a problem--we had many open sites that evening. She said she would be tent camping, just her and her mother, who was in the passenger seat of the car. I led her to an available site and wished her a pleasant evening and a good camping trip.
The next morning I was startled to see tents spread all over that woman's campsite as well as throughout the adjacent site. When I went to see why so many tents were there, the woman (party of 2, who rented one site from us) said, "Oh, well, my family is here, too." They had come in and set up between midnight and when I looked out at 6:45 AM. At that point, I counted sixteen people and 5 tents in the sites. I told the woman she needed to pay for an additional site, because only 8 campers per site were allowed, and also because her group had already spread out into the adjacent site, meaning it was not available to other campers. She said she'd come settle up with a check "in a bit . . . if she HAD to . . ."
As soon as I left, several people in her group headed across the parking lot and up into the laundry room, where we have 3 very nice commercial high-efficiency washers and 3 commercial dryers for campers to use. Each person was carrying two large black garbage bags, apparently full of dirty clothes. Several signs in the laundry room instruct campers to pay for laundry, $4.00 per wash/dry load, at the office or at the park hosts' RV. (The laundry fee is a bit high, but we provide users with a name-brand high-efficiency detergent at no charge in an attempt to protect the washers from being subjected to damage from an over-abundance of soap and soapsuds.) Throughout the day, I watched a steady stream of people from the "tent city" go back and forth, hauling one load of laundry after another in and out of the laundry room. When I made my late-night inspection of the laundry and shower areas, all six machines were still hard at work, and the laundry room floor was covered with feathers. Feathers! I asked the man sitting by the door where the feathers had come from; he said he had no idea: "I'm just here waiting for our clothes to finish." I told him I needed to check the dryers because they seemed to be extremely hot to the touch (of course they were--they'd been hard at work for over 10 hours by that time). When I opened the 3 dryer doors, a storm of feathers swirled out and onto me, the floor, and the folding counter. In each dryer were what appeared to be pillows and comforters. The lint filters were so filled with feathers that it's a miracle a fire hadn't occurred by the time I checked them. I looked at the guy who "had no idea" about the origin of the feathers, and he admitted he was washing feather bedding.
In the office I asked the cashier if the group doing the marathon laundry had paid for all the loads they'd done and were still doing. No, they hadn't. I went back to the laundry room and told the man that the group owed the park approximately $120 (3 loads per hour for what had been at the LEAST 10+ straight hours of washing and drying). That figure was just a guess--the machines have 58 minute wash cycles, and the laundry march had begun a little over 10 hours earlier. The man said he knew the group owed a lot for the laundry and that he'd pay by check when all the laundry was finished.
The woman who rented the site did pay the extra fees, by check. It bounced.
The man did pay the laundry fees, by check. It bounced.
The laundry room and both campsites were left trashed.
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