Last Days At Big Bear

 

It has been an interesting season here at Serrano Campground at Big Bear Lake. This was our first camp hosting job and it turned out to be pretty much what we expected. This is the busiest campground in the San Bernardino system so we learned under fire.

We started the season in April with 2 camp host couples and one Host/Maintenance couple. By the end of May we lost the Host /Maintenance couple due to being needed in another area. At the beginning of June we lost a camp host couple, that left Max and I as the only ones left. We did have some local help that would come in on our days off to clean sites and the restrooms.

We would work on average about 5 hours in the morning then 1 to 2 hours in the afternoon then about 3 hours in the evening. The later hours were usually easier physically but we had more people issues during that time. Sometimes getting people to follow the rules can be a challenge.

We would only get paid for 8 hours a day but spent on average 10 to 11. Having our work hours split up all day long does not appeal to most people, and some camp hosts would only want to work a straight 8 hours. That does not work well in a busy campground. The restrooms need to be serviced in the early evening and then again around 9 or 10 pm, and the site manager likes us out on the golf cart selling firewood in the evenings as well. Needless to say we were very busy trying to keep everything up. Hopefully next year we will have better luck keeping fully staffed.

This campground is booked at 100 percent capacity from Memorial Day through Labor Day. We just started to have openings during the week when the government shutdown occurred. Once we got the word that we would be shutting down we had to give the campers that were in here 48 hours to leave and we were not letting anyone else in.

Max started calling people with reservations to let them know that we were closed etc… people were understandably not happy. While she was doing this, I finished up cleaning up the fire pits and getting things ready to winterize.

Since last Friday at noon,  the gates were closed and we had an empty campground. We started our winterizing procedures on all four restrooms and shower facilities. We also had to take three days to drive company vehicles 200 miles to their winter storage area.

Wednesday we woke up to this outside our window

Luckily by late afternoon most of it had melted

We finished our last day on Thursday doing inventory on power equipment and we helped our boss move her 5th wheel trailer to a storage area.

We have to be off property by Saturday, but elected to leave today (Friday)  instead. We are heading to the Thousand Trails park in Menifee Ca, and will stay there for a week or so and figure out what to do with all of our spare time we will have.

We are slated to come back up here next April but until then we are ready to get off this mountain for awhile and return to 80 degree weather.

Enjoy Your Day!