Welcome the weekend warriors, those RVers and other campers who swarm our campgrounds on Saturdays and Sundays! I remember the excitement and the unmitigated joy that we had as weekend warriors. Sometimes if we were really lucky we could even squeeze in a Sunday night. I would spend all week happily getting ready for our mini trip – packing, loading the RV, starting the fridge, planning the meals…
We talk a lot about the negatives of the weekend warrior invasion in this newsletter, particularly in my Campground Crowding column: the noise, kids running all over, the campfire smoke, disrespect for the sites, overabundance of trash and most irritating of all, the total disruption of OUR peace. It helps to remember the joy and excitement we had as the campground crowds and the noise increases.
We are in a regional campground on a Friday afternoon watching the weekend warriors roll in. By Saturday, all 279 sites will be filled. Our RV is not our home away from home, it is our home. We are full-timers and we get to camp every night.
As camp hosts, we meet the weekend warriors and I am struck by how many are new and totally enamored by camping. I am awed by how much work it is too, particularly for tent campers. They come in with their cars filled to the brim with kids, tents, cabanas, sleeping bags, a roof top carrier and sometimes a trailer full of bikes. They spend hours setting up and taking down.
The weekend warriors are having fun and creating memories
As I look around the campground, these weekend warriors are in small and large groups laughing, talking, eating together. They are happy to just “be away” and sit around a campfire, even in 90-degree heat. Yes, kids are running around and sometimes they run through our site. Yes, it is noisy and smoky and the generators are roaring. But these weekend warriors will be gone on Sunday afternoon, exhausted but happy. They have to return to their nine-to-five, the laundry, the unpacking… all while we will still be sitting in our camp chairs waving goodbye.
I am happy to share this little piece of heaven with them.
We stopped to talk to a couple as we were making our rounds tonight and they mentioned how much they loved the park and their memories camping here. I pointed to a site, B01, where we camped with our children for almost 20 years. The memories flooded in: the kids running around, making s’mores, cleaning their sticky little faces and hands. I remembered how important it was to relax for a few days without the pressure of house cleaning, washing clothes, mowing lawns. I remembered how golden the memories have become: to us, to our children and now to our grandchildren.
So, to all you hard-working weekend warriors, welcome!
##RVT1014
I grew up camping. My parents did not allow us to wander through someone’s site for any reason. If a ball rolled onto someone’s spot, we were to stay away and ask permission to retrieve the ball. We didn’t scream when we played or the response from dad was, “Scream again and I’ll give you something to scream about.” When quiet hours came about, it was mostly lights out and drop your voice. My mom called it a six-inch voice. If she could hear us farther than six inches away, we were too loud. Kids and parents don’t have to be complete jerks when they’re camping. We had fun and created lifelong memories without interfering with someone else’s fun and memory making.
Except for the lack of available spaces on the weekends. Requires so much more planning now.
I too was a weekend warrior sometimes finishing setup Saturday morning as we were delayed leaving home. Thanks for the reminder, although I will say our kids were taught never run/walk through someone else’s camping spot without permission to do so, such as retrieving a ball or frisbee. I think manners is something missing in the raising of children today, maybe the parents are the same way.