Road Trippin'

Lucy....You got sum 'splainin' to do! Anyone familiar with this movie should have an idea of what I'm about to say. No, it's not collecting rocks, per se...

We are picking up rocks...& turning them into jewelry. We were brainstorming ways to make a little extra gas money and after seeing pieces like this:










selling for $20 and more, I knew we had found something we could do. We figured we kinda had an edge on most people doing it...We travel. We can pick up rocks native to one part of the country and take them elsewhere to sell. A good example of this are stones like prairie agates & rose quartz. We spent a couple of afternoons walking around in the Buffalo Grasslands & picked up over 60 agates.



One I found was almost as big as my head (& we all know how big that is)! So we bring all these "found in the rough gems" back to our makeshift lapidary shop (formerly the motel office), and put them through the magic process that takes this;



Cut it into slabs like this;




Then, through the magic of television er, grinding and polishing, we end up with a work of art like this;



Then we can either wrap with wire or glue a metal piece to it & put it on a necklace. Add some other beads and trinkets, bake in a 425° oven and VIOLA!
We're thinking of marketing direct to the public through gem and rock shows as well as hitting the flea markets and various festivals. Doing the festivals kinda fits in with one of the road trips we were wanting to do anyway. Eating and drinking your way cross country sounds like a great way to kill a year or two to me.

Cheers!!

Basil & Sybil are alive & well and living in South Dakota! Well, not quite, but I can't help but think of that show as I work through the daily events at this motel. We don't have quite the same temperament as they do, but we do have some of the silliness going on.

We've been asked to come back to Happy Holiday RV Resort in Rapid City to manage the motel for the season. We hadn't planned to return this year, in fact we were going to stay in Carlsbad for the summer, as we had been informed that my S.S. hearing was scheduled for January or so, 2008. Fritz called to tell us that the job came with the free use of an apartment for the winter, should we care to stay. I saw a way to kill two birds with one stone here. I wasn't looking forward to trying to travel through Denver in mid winter! So here we are.

It's been one Hell of a season! We've been on the desk 15 hrs a day for 4 1/2 days a week & jeeze, did we get burnt out! Its a small motel of 31 rooms, 4 of which are kitchenettes. Additionally we are responsible for 12 sleeping cabins.

When the season got underway, we had no staff...just us. We cleaned rooms, check guests in & out & did laundry as well. I was sure this wasn't the job description I had reviewed. Fritz, the resort manager, assured us that he had an ad in the newspaper and just as soon as school was out we'd be inundated with applications.

The end of the school year came & went...still no apps. We desperately wisely decide to go through the files of last years employees in hopes of coaxing them back for a second season. Looking at these files left us further deflated. Most of the previous years employees consisted of transients, alcoholics, and Springer show rejects. Some were Native Americans. We thumbed through the files of Mabel Big Crow, Jamie Iron Thunder, Joe Lends His Horse & Linda Hunts Horse. (Linda may want to talk to Joe to see if he actually owned the horse he lent). All of these folders had notations citing reasons why these individuals should not be considered for rehire. Reasons ranging from undependable to drunk and disorderly at work. One of them even told the story of a fist fight breaking out in the parking lot between mother & daughter...probably over who's horse it really was.

As we returned the folders to their drawer, we rethought our options & decided that an 18 hour day really wasn't that bad. All we really had to do was answer the phone, make reservations, check guests in & out, clean rooms, do laundry, clean cabins, and handle all complaints. Yeah, that's all...At least we didn't have to cook!

Continental Breakfast


Just a couple of weeks into our new job, Fritz started to make noises about how the owners wanted to serve continental breakfast. I tell him I really don't mind if they want to do it...just as long as they don't want us to do it. About instantly I can tell by the look on his face that I am deeply mistaken. Not only do they want us to serve it, they think LeAnna would have time to bake all the muffins herself. *right* I break the news to LeAnna. It only takes 15 minutes for my ears to stop ringing. After we do some rough calculation, we determine that during an average day in July or August, she'd have to bake around, oh...TEN HOURS A DAY!

We confronted Fritz & told him that since we NEVER agreed to any cooking, let alone serving foodstuffs to the masses each day, that this would be a deal breaker. After hashing back & forth a short time, we finally came to the agreement that he would buy the muffins and juice from Sams club & we would put the crap food out every morning.

We FINALLY started to get some applicants trickle in. The only thing was they were between 14 & 16 years old. So we decided that there was little difference in working 2 women for 6 hours a day or working 6 girls for 2 hours a day. We opted for this schedule for two reasons. 1) We figured with six girls they would only have to do between 2 and 4 rooms each on any given day, so they would work faster. And 2) most of them really only wanted to work around 15 hours a week.

So, there we went. Our housekeeping staff of six teenage girls, two of their moms, along with two workcamper ladies. Covering the office on our 2 1/2 days off were two other workcamper ladies, with their husbands acting as maintenance staff. Life was starting to take a turn towards the rosy side...or so we thought.

Continental Breakfast. Two words you never, never, ever want to say to a guest. It's akin to putting blood in a shark tank. When you mention to a guest you have "continental breakfast", somehow you commit yourself to the unspoken promise of "all you can eat". We actually had guests pissed off about our "only having juice, coffee & muffins". One lady had the balls gall to say to LeAnna "You call this continental breakfast?", to wit LeAnna replied "No, I call this orange juice & muffins". -priceless-

After a week or so of that I instructed everyone to NEVER, but NEVER say the words contental breakfast to ANYONE! If asked, simply say that we have coffee, juice & muffins in the lobby each morning. After making this change, all was well. For some reason, when you just casually mention that there will be coffee, juice & muffins in the morning, everyone is completely placated.

Something else I have come to realize about motel guests... even though this motel is in an RV park, the people who come here aren't the same type of people as RVers. If something is amiss at an RV site, most people are content to work around it. Not so with motel guests. If there is so much as 3 plastic cups in the room instead of 4, you will hear about it. And not just in passing or in a "could I please have an extra cup" kind of way, but it's suddenly tantamount to their expecting a refund.

I'm not kidding. It's like a sport to these people, trying to find some reason for which they either shouldn't have to pay full price or are due a complete refund. LeAnna & I would check every room behind housekeeping so that we wouldn't have to hear any bullshit complaints from any guest.

The Sturgis Rally

Ah yes... The Rally. Now here's a treat everyone should have to endure experience. Imagine a town of about 65,000 suddenly swelling to around 165,000. This whole end of the state grows to a population of around 600,000 people during these two weeks in August...all of them riding Harley's. Loud Harley's. All Day. Every Day. Oh the first day or two, you're wrapped up in the nice paint jobs and cool looking bikes, but slowly over the course of the next few days you start to become sensory overloaded, to the point of where I would have gladly tied a screaming baby to the back of my head if they would all just ride those damn bikes over the nearest cliff.

During these 2 weeks, everyone in the state is busy capping off their summer earnings, trying to make enough to get them through the winter. If you're smart you get all your groceries and gas before Rally time, cause prices skyrocket. Not to mention that trying to navigate through the biker traffic is a frickin' nightmare. Every year there are between 10 & 15 deaths here in those two weeks. But there are people coming here to ride every year, like they've never been here before. And I guess it's a good thing overall, cause it's really a shot in the arm to the local communities. Without it, towns like Sturgis itself would probably just dry up and blow away.

So that gets everyone up to speed. Here we'll stay, awaiting my hearing date, looking for the first snowfall, and trying to hold on until spring. This is the first year we will see snow of any amount since we went on the road. We definitely aren't looking forward to it. While the motor home is in "dry dock", I'm taking the opportunity to make some changes. We've decided to change our decor from nautical to a Tuscan feel. Towards that effort, I've put up a new ceiling, recovered the wall behind the kitchen sink, and have changed our light fixtures. We've also added a few bells and whistles in the form of





a power dump gate, so we don't have to go outside to dump the tank (as it's invariably either raining or a dust storm when this chore needs done), some Tot Locks, to stop some of the drawers and doors from coming open at inopportune times on the road, and last but certainly not least, LeAnna has finally broken me down & I've agreed to another redo of the bathroom. This time we're losing the bathtub (all 40" of it) and putting in a shower! I found one on Ebay for about $100, and it fits the same footprint as the bathtub. Hopefully this will make for an easy conversion.

We've got until September 15 or so of 2008 to get everything up to snuff. I don't plan to be out there on Sept 1 trying to finish! I'll be hacking away for as long as the weather holds this year, then I'll hit it again early next spring. We'll post new pix on the website as things progress.

Till next time...