Day 21 / 344

Goliad, Texas  76 degrees  Sunny

"What's it like to be an RV Volunteer?"  Answer # 21 :  Jobs you have likely done your whole life will be very different when you perform them in the context of being a campground volunteer. 

Mowing is one of my favorite outdoor activities and one of very few solitary times that I enjoy. Mowing a campground is a real game changer. Unlike your own yard that you are familiar with and have a particular pattern or routine; a campground is foreign territory. As many hours as I have mowed here, I will have only mowed a couple of areas more than once. There are some 600 acres here to maintain and several people tasked with mowing from day-to-day.

Mowing a campground is something like navigating the Brady Bunch driveway. Even an unoccupied site has far more obstacles. Picnic tables, grills, fire rings, lantern poles, small trees, sewer connections, hydrants and power poles; you get the idea. In Texas this time of year there are also clumps of wildflowers to mow around. Texans love their wild flowers, as do I and they want to see them when they are blooming. I think I heard somewhere that it is a capital offence to mow down a Blue Bonnet in Texas.

The cool thing is you see every detail of the campground and can make note of things that need attention.  My joy today was watching new flowers getting ready to open and noticing more new butterfly species hanging around the flowers or landing on the mower. Campers will stop and want to visit and that's fine, they're curious about us, just like I was before I became a camphost.

In this campground you can always tell if there were kids around. Apparently kids love to put bit sticks in the tops of ant hills. And in Texas you can't spit without hitting an ant hill. I chuckle when I go into and area and see sticks poking up everywhere. It's like the kids are trying to stake claim from the ants while they are there. Mesquite trees have unforgivable thorns as I found out last week when I wasn't paying attention to what kind of tree I was about to go under. That was about as fun as the fire ants crawling up my pants.

Every time I work outside in Texas, I have John Wayne's voice in the back of my head. There's a line in the movie Rooster Cogburn when he's talking to Katherine Hepburn,  that goes something like: "Everything in these woods will either bite ya, stab ya, or stick ya. "  That's about right!

In case I haven't mentioned it lately, I LOVE being an RV Volunteer!

Until tomorrow...