I don't know, Patty, would you actually go and do water aerobics at an RV park if that was an activity? I thought we would talk about that and much more in this episode of "Tribbles with the Laney," the podcast. Hey, everyone. Welcome back. My name is Patrick. And I'm Patty. And we've got Truman here on the old Bobo podcast couch, as we like to call it. Yeah. Sitting around in our luxurious, I don't have a new 29 RL. There you go. And it's brand new. It's 2024. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. We are enjoying this RV, aren't we? Yes, we are. And this couch, this couch ends up working out perfect for recording this podcast. It does. It spits pups and us. Yeah. The best, on the other hand, has decided to sit over in the theater seating. She likes to smuggle by her dog food bowl. Yeah, she has literally wrapped around her food bowl, sleeping. She likes to protect it, I guess. Strange. It is strange. Well, before we get into talking about campground activities, we have to do another exciting round of this or that. All right. I'm ready. Are you? I think. You think? You don't know? I'm not sure. Oh, it's... Nope. Well, here we go. All right. Here we go, Patty. Yep. I've got my over the fire popcorn popper. Oh, yeah. Which would you rather have? Mm-hmm. Buttered popcorn. Yes. Or kettle corn. Ooh. I like both. Mm-hmm. What a choice. Wow. So you did a popcorn with a fire last Friday night and it was awesome. People loved it. Mm-hmm. It was so good. I really wanted to make some kettle corn. Yeah. I know you did. We just ran out of time. Fine. I'm going to go with good old popcorn. The butter popcorn. All right. That's what I'm going with. Now, see, I really wanted to do some kettle corn, which really just is the matter of adding some sugar to it once it starts popping. But everybody was enjoying the buttered. Yep. And I think I mentioned kettle and a couple of people turned up their nose and so. They did. And I didn't want to get the sugar and the bowl because... I think it's... Well, we had s'mores going, too, so maybe they thought they just wanted something savory, but... I will say, though, between the s'mores that we were doing and the popcorn... Popcorn was a hit. The popcorn was more... Yeah, definitely the most popular of the s'mores. And you know, it was so humid last Friday evening when we're out doing this stuff that we have a tray that we lay out all the goodies for the s'more. Yeah. I couldn't believe how wet the graham crackers got that we had out there. They were so like yuck-o by the time I cleaned up. That was nuts. Yeah. It was pretty humid. Yeah. It was actually... Yeah. It was Thursday night because it was the fourth of July. That's right. And yeah. It felt like Friday night. July holiday. My days are all messed up. It felt like the holiday that would never end. Yeah, it did. It just kept going and going. Oh. Yeah, and for those of you that don't know, we are at Happy Acres Camp Round in Angle, Indiana. Yeah. We seasonal here. I now work here full time in the summer, and so it started on Wednesday, actually, even though the fourth of July was on Thursday. So if you want to get technical, you guys started prepping last Monday, Tuesday. Yeah. Because we started getting things around for activities and mowing. And what the mowing... We're trying to get mowing done before Wednesday, and Wednesday, I think we had... I understand we're a small campground. We have about 90 total sites with the cabins. But we had like 20, I think, we'll just say 20-22 check-ins on Wednesday. And I was fully ready. You were ready. I was ready for it. You were on it. And I set up there from like 1 until 3.30. He didn't get my first check until 3.30. He's like, "Oh, I'm in here." And most of those 20 came in probably between about 4 and 6. Yeah, it was busy then. And then it was like a mass rolling trailer line. Yeah. It was like a 2-2 train. It kept coming. And Thursday, which was actually the 4th of July, we had another like 13 or 16. And it was just the opposite. They all showed up right at 1 o'clock. And I think by 3 o'clock, everyone was in the park. And then we had activities on Thursday because it was the 4th. We did activities on Friday. We did activities on Saturday. And then Sunday morning. And then Sunday morning, we had like 33 check-outs. So I don't know. It just felt like with so many, because normally on like Memorial Day and Labor Day, it's Friday or the check-in Friday night, and then you have activities on Saturday and Sunday. So it's like two days of activity. This was boom, boom, boom. We had three days of activities and with people rolling in a day early, oh, it was crazy. It was crazy, crazy. Great. Anyway, speaking of activities, you and I have been having this conversation for awhile about activities at campgrounds, and are they necessary? Do you book because a campground has activities or is it what I would say is just something that checks a box? And what I mean by that is when I used to run hotels, we used to always say that almost every hotel in America has a pool. A lot of them look like an oversized bathtub. And people used to call us because we didn't have a very big pool when I ran the Auburn Inn, but we would get people who would call and say, "Do you have a pool?" And yet hardly anyone ever used that pool. It was like they wanted the pool, but they weren't actually going to use the pool. And I think we were actually driving between Hilton Head and Pigeon Forge, or maybe it was Pigeon Forge at home. And we started having this discussion like, "Do you have to have activities at a campground to book it?" Right. And do you actually use them if you're like, "I want activities, but do you actually go do them?" We, you and I, how many activities do we typically do when we're camping? Not. Like you mean like where we go and like do a group activity? Right. Like where they have the schedule and it says, you know, like there's a, you know, water aerobics at 6 o'clock in the morning and you know, or whatever, they, I, we very, I can very well. In Hilton Head we did. I can think of that. Well, we were kind of scouting out activities here. We kind of needed that because we were scouting for our own campground. Yeah. We did a couple things. Yeah. Right. But in general. Yeah. In general, no. No. Now we don't typically look for activities. No. Meaning when we go to book, we're not like, "Hey, do you have activities?" I have to have this. Yeah. Because honestly, to us camping is the activity. Exactly. And, you know, like we once were there. Now we like amenities. Yes, you know, my amenities I think have changed over the years because I think now I am definitely in if there's a lazy river. I know. I am like, we have so much fun in that lazy river of Margaritaville. And the Margaritaville cart that came around for adults. Yeah. That was pretty good. Kids chasing. You don't find either of those in any campgrounds. No. But activities. But activities. Yeah. I don't need them for me. I don't need them. So we ran. And part of the reason I said, "Let's talk about this because we've been having this discussion." Yeah. And then we're looking at, you know, putting activities on the calendar for the rest of this camp. For this campground. Yeah. And it's kind of like, you know, how important. Because I will tell you Angie, for those of you who don't know Angie, I talk about Angie. Like everybody knows Angie. She's the owner here. She's a bit costly. Yeah. Angie and Kevin, Kozak, owners here. Yeah. Happy Acres Campground. She has said that, you know, in the past she scheduled lots of activities, but very few people come to them. Right. And there are a lot of work, if for no other reason, the preparation that goes into getting ready for it. Right. Usually it's like, I call it as teaching the front end. All this if you got to do a head and then when the activity is like, "Boom, done." Yeah. You know, all this prep, all this stuff ahead of time, so you got to get ready for it. Right. I mean, some of them are, you know, like we do fairly frequently here, a corn hole turn. Right. That one, there's not a lot of prep, as long as you have the bracket made up. Yeah. Oh, my brackets. Yeah. Brackets just mess with my brain. I mean, you don't like the brackets. I get soooo'd. I mean, that's an easy activity to offer because the only prep is, we award the winning team these little mini corn hole board, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's like a little trophy, but it's like a little, I mean, it's like corn hole work. Angie makes them paints them. They're super cute. Angie has the time to get those painted and ready. And then as far, you know, it doesn't take long to set up. You and I can set up corn hole boards. To get the boards out and the bags and the measurement, because you've got to have a official measurement. And we have a, you know, Steve who works here with this Steve has, you know, he made us a rope to quickly measure the boards to get them to 27 feet. But like, that's an easy one. But then there's other activities. They take some time. They do. Yeah. Trivia. Trivia. We do. Yeah. It takes a little time. Yep. And when Angie's done like the craft activities, she's gone by all the supplies. They should have enough for everyone and what you need and clean up stuff and everything. Right. So I, you know, I don't know. And when you think about what activities we've been doing, like I said, corn hole is a regular activity here, not every weekend, but I would say at least a couple of times a month. Probably, yeah. Because that's a pretty easy one. We've been doing community bonfires, where usually that's on like a Friday night because we know campers get in that, you know, you get off work, you know, hitch up, you head out to the campground, you get in late. And sometimes when we used to do that, we didn't want to make a fire because like I'm just tired. I'm too tired. But if there was like a community bonfire, you could just walk up, pop your chair down. Sure. Absolutely. And then we always provide the stuff for s'mores when we do the community bonfires. I think they've been kind of a hit. I think so. Yeah. Those aren't bad. But then like I said, then we get into, sometimes we do the friendly feud trivia. Yeah. That takes a little work. You know, we're going to try SINGO. That's taking a little work. That's like bingo. Bingo what you sing. No, the song is given to you and you got to think of the title of the song. We played that in Hilton Head Act. That was a blast. That was a lot of fun. Yeah. And we actually have that coming up here in a couple of weeks for the first time ever. We're going to play a new game called Get Happy. Come on. Get happy. It's, it's just bingo, but instead of B-I-N-G-O, it's H-A-P-P-Y, Addy found a really cool site where you can build your own bingo cards. And we're going to have the folks when they get a bingo, they got to go, "Get happy!" Or maybe, "I'm happy!" Yeah, something final. I'll be fine. Yeah. You know, think about some of the activities we've seen though. And you know, I joke about the water aerobics, but we've actually seen that. I've seen that. Not at 6 a.m., but they do have like, I think it wasn't at Pigeon Forge, or was it Hilton Head? I think it was Hilton Head. Yoga. In the pool yoga. Or something like that. Well, there's always been. I don't know if it was in the pool. They was on the pool thing. Pool parties. I think pool parties are pretty common at campgrounds because they're, they're a lot of work, but they're easy to do. Well, it depends how far you take it because, yeah, it's an oxymoron because you have to decide are you going to have like, games for kids in the pool or adults or whatever? Like, you know, like diving down in the water, finding all the little tokens that they drop in the water or whatever. Or is it just playing some music, hanging out, having a good time? What is it going to be? Yeah. I mean, so there's different ways you can do the pool part. That's why I said they're easy to do, but there are a lot of work because even when we do them here and we've really just been playing like, you make a playlist and we got lucky this last time. You set up all the equipment. We had fire and ice local folks come over with and we paid them, of course, but they did their Italian. They actually came on. Oh, do they really? Yeah. They came out for free. Italian ice. But they said they did really well because a lot of people bought Italian ice from them. And it was so good. In fact, they did so well. They're coming back. Yeah. It was so hot on Saturday and it worked well with our pool party and people loved it. And it was a good addition, so that wasn't hard for us, you know? Right. But anyway, yeah. Yeah. And I sometimes struggle as I'm putting together the activities and she does a really good job. She kind of puts in the big things and then she leaves the small stuff up to you and I to decide. Yeah. But I've struggled with getting creative for new things to do. And again, I don't know how important are they because again, there are a lot of work. You have to have staff. That's part of the issue. You've got to have someone who's able to manage it. Do it. Yeah. And you know, we're a small campground here. We don't have a lot of staff. A lot of us do multiple things. Right. Yeah. So, you know, I think that's one of the challenges. I think if you're one of the bigger resorts, you know, like we just came from two bigger resorts. They probably have a staff. They do. Both places had an activities director and I'm sure that was their dedicated job. They were paid to hire that juggler that we saw earlier in the lazy river. Yeah. In fact, when we were at the pool party at Margarita, the activities director introduced a couple other gentlemen there helping her and she said they're part of our activity team. Yeah. So, they must have a whole team of people. Wow. But they do activities seven days a week. They do. And some of those days were, you know, it was morning to night. Kind of like when we were to Disney and I helped out with activities, there was activities every day. Yeah. There was stuff going on every day. Crafts. Challenges. And activities at the pool and different scavenger hunts and all kinds of stuff going on. Yeah. We don't do a lot of kid activities here because that's not really our target audience. No. Yeah. We try to, the target audience is more adults, adult activities. Like when Angie has, you know, the singers come in in the evening. Yeah. Live music is very popular here. It's fun. Yeah. And, you know, Angie hires local musicians and they'll come out and perform for two maybe up to three hours and then, you know, Marty from the six restaurant brings her whiskey wagon out. Yeah. People love that. Yeah. You know, buy, buy your favorite cocktail and sit down and listen to some good music. Yeah. And they're actually really good musicians. They have been really good and this last weekend, I think it was a cool one. She had a meat cookoff contest. Yeah. Yeah. We had the meat cookoff last weekend. Yeah. And people enjoyed that. But again, six people participated. That's right. It wasn't. Yeah. And do you know, hun, was it seasonal, folks? No, actually the winner was a group of nightlings up on the skybox. Cool. But yeah. So it's always a variety because sometimes a lot of the seasonals do all the certain things like they do all of the where we have entertainment or they do all the pool parties. But it's always interesting to see, you know, who's there and what's going on. Yeah. I do enjoy looking at the mix on activities of, you know, who's actually coming to. It does seem to vary on what the activity is. But the other thing is, and Angie and I were talking about this the other day is, you know, over the 4th of July, we noticed a lot of people did not come to the activities because they were doing their own activities at their sites. Right. Meaning what we saw was a lot of like families or groups camping together. Hanging out. Yeah. And you just see these big bonfire. And I said, not big as in the fire was big, but a big circle. Yeah. Yeah. What we used to do years ago when all of us went camping, all the family went camping together. And I know some of the nightlies had their own cornhole boards or activities they were doing with their kids. Right. And they'd be like, we used to take stuff like that when we camped. Your sister would take stuff. But yeah, it was interesting to see, you know, if I think folks like to come, like especially here and there's pickleball, they like to do that. There's disc golf. Right. And that, some of a lot of the kids lately, and I just saw some group walk by here while I'm sitting here, they have their fishing poles and the catching release is like kind of more just what's already here, nothing that has to be like managed per se. Right. Yeah. It almost makes you wonder like if we just stop doing activities. What would happen? What would happen? Yeah. We wondered that too. Would it matter? Would it affect the occupancy? Yeah. Because it goes back to if a hotel doesn't have a pool, would you not stay there because they didn't have a pool, regardless of whether you're in a swimmer? Does it, do you have to have at least some activities to check a box in people's minds? Right. So they go, oh yeah, look at, oh, they have activities, and they have this, we have to go there, but then they don't do any activities. Yeah. Because I've had people, you know, say like, oh, that sounds like, that's going to be fun, and then they don't show up for the activity, you know, it's like, and I think sometimes mentally just knowing it's available. Right. And so maybe we need to continue doing activities, but for us, honestly, that has never crossed our mind. No. It's not even a factor. In picking a camera out? Yeah. No. It's not even anything. I'm like, oh, all right. They got it. Doesn't mean it doesn't matter when we're at the other team. I think we did an episode where we talked about how we picked cameras. Yeah, we did. You know, and we talked about things like cleanliness and safety security. That's a big, first two things are big, big ones. But activities is definitely not on the list. Honestly, I mean, we even when it came around has a pool, we don't use it a lot. But see, now that lazy river is going to be on our list. Lazy river. If only Disney had a Lazy river. Oh, if only Disney had a Lazy river. Would it be in the shape of Mickey Mouse? That would be cool. That would be cool. Lazy river. Yeah. Nice. I don't know. Kevin keeps saying he wants to put in a Lazy river here. Yeah. Big plans for one. It's a very intricate. Yeah. But I don't know. I don't know. I was going to pull that one off. But yeah. I think that might be a little out of Angie's budget. I think so. Yeah. Mm hmm. Anyway, I don't know. I just, I just, we've been having this discussion and I said, why don't we go ahead and discuss this on the podcast? The big factor or not? Yeah. And yeah, and I'd love to hear all of your opinions on, you know, do activities play a part in a book. And you know what? You're thinking we don't have any children and that, see, that brings up in here. And that might be what some people with children, they want activities to keep them occupied and not drive the pit. That is such an interesting point that you bring up at this point of the podcast. I'm starting to wrap it up and you just opened up a whole can of worms because you're right. We don't have children. We just have puppies for babies. Right. And they don't need activities. No. It's a walking path. But if you have children, does that impact? Does that matter? Right. And, and our campground, and I say ours, meaning where we work, where we work, we don't cater to children. But if you were a, let's say a jelly stone or a KOA, or even a margarita bill, that, you know, definitely still caters to kids, even though it's also an adult, you know, like how? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Patty. Ooh, I put a zinger in there. You put a zinger in there. Oh, sorry. So we might see that in some of the comments where people may say, yeah, activities are very important because we have kids because then all of a sudden the activities look a lot different. Right. But what we do here is that you're doing things like tie, dye, t-shirts, and sand castle building. I remember at Disney, we had like, you know, art time and game board time. And, you know, we had scavenger hunts and pool parties and competitions in the pool. Yeah. They don't typically do bourbon tasting at Disney. No, they don't either. Yeah. That should be an adult activity, right? Yeah. Well, you know, we were gone, but Angie did have any bourbon tasting here on National Bourbon Day. Right. We missed it. I mean, the planting thing, that was an adult thing where we made planters. Yeah. Yeah. But that's what I'm saying. That's the difference between adult activities versus kid activities. Right. So maybe if you have kids, again, we've never had kids, no, at least not the kind with two legs. We have four legged. Yeah. We have the four legged kind. And so maybe that would be a huge difference. So let us know in the comments, I am so curious to hear, you know, like, how important are they? And do you even ask that when you call the book or, you know, a reservation? And why do people call the book reservations when you can do it online? But that's a whole nother. That's a whole nother topic. Podcast. We might have to talk about that because I've been asking that because I have taken a ton of reservations this week when I've been in the office and I'm like, you know, what I want to say, and I don't say this, but you can book online, you don't have to talk to me. You don't need to talk to a human. It works out great. It's perfect. Yeah. All right, everyone. Sorry to put that clinker in there. I just came to my brain. Yeah. I'm glad you did. I think that because otherwise somebody would have said that. And so I'm glad you threw that out. My brain was working. It was working. Speaking of people working. How about Mr. Jim? He's always working. He's our friend. He's our producer. Thank you, Jim. And he's the one that makes sure our audio is pitch-perfect. Poor guy has to listen to these things. Yeah, I know. How many times do you think he goes through while editing? He goes, slaps his head like, "Oh, no." Probably so sick of us. But thank you, Jim. And thank you to all of you for either listening to our favorite podcast, Platform, or if you're watching us on our dedicated YouTube channel, "Travels with Blaney," the podcast. Yes, yes. Yeah, Patty, that's your one. I missed it. I appreciate all of you. Yeah. And until next time, everybody, we'll see ya. On Down Road. Bye. Bye. ♪ Travels with Blaney ♪ ♪ We'll see you on down the road ♪ ♪ Come on, get happy ♪
