It’s been lovely weather the last week or so…plenty nice enough to wear shorts and tank tops. Yesterday, however, a storm came through and today we’re socked in and it’s raining pretty steady. We’re on our way to Airdrie to check out parts for the awning we lost in the windstorm earlier in the summer. Turns out we just need a couple of struts and can put the thing back together ourselves.
I played fetch with Oso in the overflow area this morning. He’s getting good at bringing the ball back and dropping it close to me if not right at my feet. He still needs to learn a lot…like not to jump up, not to chew people’s shoes while they are wearing them, not to nip at their fingers…he’s pretty cuddly though and in the morning I wake up with a puppy nose in my face and Tom 
ends up with a puppy butt in his face…oh well, can’t win them all.
We had the worst weekend as far as having to toss people out of the campsite that we’ve ever had. It was like all the crazies came out at once. There were four people in a motorhome in one of the sites. It was a large, long site that was difficult to see into from the road. I had been in the site earlier in the afternoon because they had some carvings they were displaying for sale and they aren’t allowed to do that in the campground. I looked at the carvings, saw that the people were drunk already and decided not to bother arguing with them. The carvings weren’t that great and nobody would bother buying them anyway, plus, you can’t talk to a drunk. I was doing the last round about 10:00 p.m. and stopped at a registration booth. I heard this yelling and swearing coming from the site and so listened to what was happening. A very drunk woman was saying something about hitting one of the men, and then about him beating a woman. That was about all I needed to hear. I phoned Conservation and they phoned the cops and within 15 minutes they were all there. All four of the people in the site were incredibly drunk. The woman tried to run away, but one of the cops hollered after her “Rebecca, if you try to run you’ll just fall down and hurt yourself”. She came back realizing, I guess, there was no place to run to. Anyway, the cops hauled them all off to the drunk tank for the night. Interestingly enough, they were back the next morning about 10:00 a.m., drunk again, swearing and fighting, got in their motorhome, backed into a few trees, ripped the mirror off the vehicle, and drove off. They stopped on the dam and one of the men climbed up onto the roof where the storage area was and got down four cases of beer…guess they needed a drink after all that! We called conservation and told them they were driving drunk and had better get them off the road. Conservation found them at another campsite called Three Sisters. I turns out that three of the four had past criminal records for violence, one of them had a weapon (gun) and so they were all hauled off to jail again.
That was quite a night. The next morning, I did a round to check out the campsite and found that two different parties involving five sites had happened at the very end of the campgrounds. Fellow campers were complaining about them and so I went and checked them out. One site was a disaster…food, cans, bottles, coolers, and more all over the place. Everyone was sleeping so I took pictures of the site then called conservation again. Further down the road where the other party had happened, people were moving around and though their sites were relatively clean, there were still complaints about them. Both sites had been partying to the wee hours of the morning…the first site in fact until 7:00 a.m. Conservation arrived and kicked all the sites out all five of the sites. He made the messy site clean up before they left which was great. Later that day when we checked the registration booth, we found a slip in there that said “U R ASSHOLES” and on the flip side “F**K U”. Guess it was our fault they got kicked out…sheesh…what do people expect. You know we have such a beautiful campsite with the lake and mountains, hiking trails, animals, and all of the things to do around there and all they can do is get pissed drunk and then whine when they get kicked out for disturbing the other campers. Go figure!
Later that night, at about 9:00 p.m., I registered a group of five guys from Banff. They had the look of partiers, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt…can’t paint all young people with the same brush, right………….wrong. I read them the riot act and told them we had six evictions and they sure don’t want to be number 7, and that conservation officers would be around. They promised they would behave…yeah, right…Do you remember a kid on Leave it to Beaver called Eddie Haskell???...yup, that’s them. Tom did the last round that night and he said they were good, sitting round the campfire talking, but I guess things changed after midnight… they partied till 4:00 a.m. They got the people next door involved so the party got even bigger. So…the next morning, someone complained, Conservation was called and the boys got kicked out. One of them said, “Oh, Corrine, we’re so sorry…we didn’t know we ruined someone’s holiday” I said, “you sure did” and told them they had disappointed me….I wonder how much good that did.
You might be wondering why we can’t hear the parties or why we don’t try to stop them…we are situated at the very front of the campground. The campground consists of 50 sites and is 6 km long. The first campsite is about ½ a km from us. We do several rounds during the evening with the last round between 10:30 and 11:00 p.m. and we’re normally home about midnight. If all looks ok then, we go to bed and call it a day. We don’t know, unless someone comes and complains that there are parties in the campground. So far we’ve only heard of parties after the fact…nobody seems to want to complain while the party is happening. Wish they would and we could deal with it immediately. Odd as it may seem, I actually enjoy dealing with the problems and being able to solve them. Guess it’s seeing the happy campers after the partiers have left.
There’s fresh snow on the mountains today…wonder if summer is over. Sure hope not…the forecast is for a sunny weekend…hope it’s quieter than the last one!
Note...it was snowing at 3:00 a.m. Thursday morning...see the fresh snow on the Three Sisters!
5 more days here and if they are as slow as last week, we’ll have lots of time to do other stuff. We did go to Banff the other day…it was fun to shop the main street. We went out for lunch at the Rose and Crown and had some really good fish and chips. This horse and carriage was kind of cool...it was downtown Banff as were the names of some of the restaurants. Didn’t see any wildlife, but had a good time checking out the town. I’m sure if we went out onto some of the mountain roads we’d run into all sorts of wildlife. We’ll have to do that one day before we leave. I’d still like to get pictures of Elk and black bear. We’ve seen both, but either didn’t have the camera or it was too dark outside for pictures.
out the window as is his favourite spot to be. He started going nuts when we got close to home and just wouldn’t stop barking. Even when we got home and out of the truck and there was nothing around, he barked his brains out.
morning we had snow on the mountains across the lake. The leaves are really turning colour quickly…most of them just turn a bright yellow, but occasionally we see an orange bush or redish tree…it’s very pretty here right now. 
azing.
