Getting Familiar With The Area

We thought we would be working yesterday, but we just had a meeting. Bill wanted to introduce us to another Workamping couple - Larry and Susan - that also arrived on Monday. He also wanted to discuss the schedule and he needed to introduce the new couple to the park the way he did with us last week when we visited. Larry will be on the maintenance crew, and his specialty is working with the heavy equipment - backhoe in particular. Susan will work on the office staff and has indicated she doesn't want to work many hours since she wants to work on personal projects such as painting and writing. The schedule is as we thought - 4 eight hour days with 3 days off. There is a little tweaking that needs to be done on the schedule but for the most part we are satisfied with it. We will begin working on Monday, February 1st. We will have every Tuesday-Thursday off, starting out at least.

There are many things we need to familiarize ourselves with. We started by driving all over Sonora and the next town, Tuolumne (pronounced too-lom-nee). We made an interesting discovery in Tuolumne - there was a casino. Of course, we had to stop in to check it out. We signed up for the Member's Card and played $10 each on the slots. Not too bad - we played for awhile before the money ran out. The name of the casino is The Black Oak Casino. We then went to the Walmart in Sonora and we can see how they could easily convert it into a Supercenter which is planned this summer. It is huge and was pretty crowded. Josie transferred one of her prescriptions here, so it will be the pharmacy she will use while here.

We also drove around Columbia and stopped at the Columbia College, a very nice two year community college tucked back in the woods. The only other campground in the area is down the road from ours and is called the Marble Quarry Campground. It is not as nice as ours, mainly because of smaller spaces, but they do have a swimming pool which is probably their main attraction. While at this campground, we spotted some deer grazing nearby:

I'm sure we will be seeing lots of "critters" while here. Bill mentioned that there were lots of deer and mountain lions (because of so much deer) and racoons that like to eat the fish that he has in his small pond by the gold panning area.

It was then back home where I grilled a couple steaks for dinner and then to bed around 9:30 after a little TV. We have a few more days of play time before we start work on Monday, so hopefully, we can discover something interesting today. We plan to stay close to home though, since we will probably have to know as much about the local area as possible to inform guests that may want to venture out while they are here. Until tomorrow...