Well this was truly some great entertainment both for the participants as well as spectators, as 29 teams of 2 people had to circumvent the park in the search of clues and cards to form the best poker hand, there were prizes for best costume as well. Obviously there were multiple cocktails involved which seemed to make some of the challanges a little tougher for some than others, in fact some were just down right challanging for the stone sober so imagine how a few chugged shots, could effect with ones ability to complete a dexterity puzzle.

So all 29 teams started in the community center, then all had to head to the same area of the park, to find a multiple plastic eggs to piece together their first clue, with that clue they had to detemine thier starting point then dispersed to different areas of the park to one of the different stations, at each station there was a skill test as well as their next clue and a card for the poker hand, oh yea there was also a shot of liquor that had to be consumed as well.

Some of the clues were a little complex and took some thought, to determine where they should be heading next, if you got out of order than you could miss some of your cards to make that perfect hand, with completion of the whole race you should have collected 10 playing cards to make the best five card poker hand possible.

While there were no royal flushes, there were some pretty good hands, with the winning hand being four 10’s with an Ace high, Four of a kind is really rare but with over ten decks of cards your odds get considerably better. So the winning hand was owned by a team called “The Beaver Liquors” (yes I can’t even make this stuff up) and the best costume was “Fred & Wilma Flintstone” which was well deserved.

And the Lady, Miss Shelly that put this all together, spent weeks of planning and making arrangenents to have people in place to control the handing out of the clues, ran 50/50 draws on all the holiday weekends to put the funds together for the drinks, as well as the prize monies. It was very obvious that this project could not have been put together with out a lot of time and effort, our hats are off to you Miss Shelly…job well done.

And to the whole team that spent a Saturday afternoon, judging and controlling each clue box job well done, we had heard about this event all summer and I think it lived up to the hype, as I said there had to be more than one hundred people involed as helpers or participants.

So we just went through our third long weekend of the Canadian camping year, and it was not without some unnecessary entertainment, as I have stated many times earlier we are managing a seasonal camp ground on the shore of Lake Huron. So most of our time and effort is centered around the seasonal guests, and in the most part the majority of them are fun loving social people that while enjoying a gathering of neighbours around a campfire for an adult beverage or two, some conversation, maybe even a little musical entertainment in most cases they act like normal folk.

We have groups that have movie nights, or pot luck dinners, washer board tournaments, jam sessions, and the like, all done with no disruption to the park, the age groups vary across many generations, from new couples with young families right through to retired folk that spend the majority of the summer right here in the park. But even in the seasonal guests there are a few that fall into the “WEEKEND WARRIOR” category, these are people that work hard all week and just want to party all weekend, and some just don’t seem to care who they impose  this on whether from loud music, shouting and cursing, or just being obnoxious and oblivious to their fellow campers or their surroundings. These are the ones that unload the coolers full of beer on Friday night and have to make a beer run on Saturday to replenish the supply so they can make it through the weekend, they can be any age, male of female, and are from many different walks of life.

These are the groups that have to be told every weekend to quiet down, that after 11 o’clock is quiet time, to which you normally get some smart ass response because they are in full warrior mode! We always just hope there will be an adult in each of these groups that has the ability to control the band of idiots, in most cases it is the person whos name is on the occupancy agreement that says they are responsible for their site and the fools on it, and failing their ability to control them, if we feel that there is a danger to other campers we can have them evicted according to the agreement that they have signed or at the very least they receive a written warning which can jeopardise the renewal of said agreement. So in most situations it never goes any further than a verbal reminder or warning, and we try to control all the warriors to avoid complaints from other guests, and I most cases we do.

But on the long weekend we had a couple of open sites so we booked some transient campers in for the weekend. Now we fall into the transient category our selves when we travel across the country, but we do not fall into the warrior category. I’m not sure if people are really as stupid as they appear but in most cases they do very little to make me think any thing other wise. We have been very fortunate that we have not had any one in the site next to us, but this weekend that changed. as you all know I have a very low tolerance for stupid people so I wont go into a lot of detail, but suffice to say it was an annoying weekend with noise and such. We are not large campfire people, we just find them dirty and stinky, the smell of smoke gets into your clothes or hair and just fills the coach, so we have our little propane fire pit that is clean and odourless to give a little warmth on a cool night or just for the ambiance of a fire. So the squirrels beside us decided to burn their garbage in their firepit, now Laurie was keeping the windows closed and the blinds down for the weekend on that side of the coach, as we were overlooking their site and as much as we did not want to look at there mess we also did not want them seeing in our coach either.

So Sunday afternoon around six o’clock we are getting this horrid stench of burning plastic, Laurie looks out the window but all we can see is smoke, so I go to investigate the cause and find the kids next door burning plastic bottles, the kind plastic water bottles that normal people would recycle, and they don’t really have a fire with flames, so it’s just a smoldering smudge pot, with this low hanging white cloud of toxic smoke that has enveloped our coach so I asked what the hell they were doing, to which I got the “we aren’t doing nothing” my next question was where the hell their parents were? So the mother pops her head out the door of there trailer but makes no effort to rectify the problem so I grab the water hose from the side of our coach and say “well let me help you with this” and start to dose the burning garbage to put out the smoldering mess. I suggest that most people use the garbage receptacles and do not burn their garbage in the fire rings, now the fellow shows up to tell me that they weren’t burning garbage. to which I reply well some one was as we are looking at half melted plastic water bottles and such…like really I don’t want to confuse the stupid people with facts, it was obvious to any one with any common sense that their children were burning this crap, end of conversation. So I just turn around and walk away, if there is one thing I have learned over the years if you argue with stupid it just spreads, so do not give it an opportunity to spread just walk away…