7/14-7/21/2012 What a Difference a Day Makes

(Rehoboth Beach, DE)

Please accept my apology to all of you who check in here frequently for a new post. It just hasn’t been happening as you have seen. There is a reason!

You see, our lives have gotten totally boring. Even to us! I go to the marina at seven, came home at noon, Bob leaves a half hour later and is home most days around five or five-thirty. Five days a week. We hate it. Not what we signed on for that’s for sure.

We tried to barter for another day off. It didn’t work.

Everyday our tempers were starting to get shorter with each other. We were frustrated with all time we were spending in the marina. We were frustrated with all the beach time we weren’t getting! Bob hasn’t been fishing and that is just unheard of. I haven’t picked up my camera since the 12th of July and that is unheard of! In short, everyday was miserable.

We had been talking about just calling it a day on this workamping job for a few weeks now. However, it was just talk. This past week things just came to a head. it wasn’t just one thing, it was several things. It was the weather, it was the fact that very few were putting their boats in which made for really long work shifts for us since we had nothing to do. It was watching the month of July fly by and knowing how many friends we haven’t seen yet. It was this and it was that and in plain words we were just miserable. We knew we had to do something.

One day last week I stopped in at the Bethany Beach Training Center which is where the Delaware National Guard’s FamCamp is located. I wanted to see what the availability for a an RV site was till the second week in September. Luckily, there was one spot available starting this coming Monday which would take us through mid-September. I told them I’d get back to them real soon.

Friday Bob came home and he didn’t have a very pleasant afternoon. Nothing to do makes for a cranky Bob. I told him that I wanted to go the FamCamp so that he could see the site and to make sure we would fit. He agreed to go and off we went, on a four mile drive south,

We rode down the FamCamp street several times and Bob finally determined that, yes, he could put our 37 feet of 5th wheel in the space. There are two sections of RV camp. The old section which has been in place for years and the newer section designed for big rigs. We are trying to get in the old section which will not take a rig longer than 37 feet. We are at the max but it affords us a space where we won’t have to move until we choose to in September. The space is available. Bob and I make the decision that the marina job just isn’t working and we reserve the space starting this coming Monday and pay the first weeks rent.

We decided that whoever saw the marina manager first would be the one to break the news that we were leaving. As it turned out I saw the assistant manager and told him. Mike said that he totally understood where we were coming from and agreed that our workday just spanned too many hours for two people who were volunteering for a campsite.

I said so long to the friends I had made over the past few months.

Around two o’clock the phone rang. It was the marina manager. She asked me if the rumor she heard was true and I assured her it was. She asked if we were giving two weeks notice and I told her that no, we weren’t because she didn’t need us there to begin with. I went on to explain that we didn’t have anything to do and she came back with “we do need you!” I started to dispute that and she said the biggest white marlin tournament in these parts was coming up and that the marina would be swamped the first week in August. I hadn’t even heard about this. She then asked if we would consider working Thursday’s, Friday’s and Saturday’s. That’s it, three days a week. I told her I’d talk to Bob and call her right back.

We’re going to do it! It would be really foolish if we didn’t. We’ll have four days straight off which will give us plenty of time to fish, go to the beach, go to Wilmington, pretty much whatever we want. So we’re going to try this. If we find it doesn’t work we know of a sweet little RV site just four miles south.