Rubber Ducky Resort & Campground – A family campground located in Warren, near Winnipeg, Manitoba

We were luckier than most campgrounds in that we didn’t have 4 inches of snow on the ground Friday morning and we didn’t have any cancellations due to weather.  The only issue that we had from the cold was some frozen water lines and sewers on Friday night and Saturday morning. Once we got on to Saturday morning the weather straightened out a little and we were into a pretty decent weekend as far as May Long’s go.

The rec building was hopping Friday evening with the strong, cold winds making it difficult to have a bonfire or do any cooking outside. Our newly renovated and updated RDR Grill was put to the test this weekend with lots of  food being enjoyed by our campers. We had a decent turnout for the Pig Roast with around 70 people being served and bingo was popular as always with an almost full house in the rec building.

I think our next acquisition around here should be a lie detector. That way when the fountain in the pond gets knocked over again we can bring in the ‘suspects’, hook them up and find out the truth. Next step would be sending them into the pond to fix things back up instead of us having to find a lovely volunteer from the audience. (OK not so lovely, but the help was much appreciated anyway) Typical with any weekend when we have a campground full of people there are always some personality conflicts. The lie detector would very quickly solve the ‘he said, she said’ incidents. We get called upon to figure out whose story to believe and then figure out what we are supposed to do about it. Not always an easy task. This past weekend was probably one of our worst for senseless destruction and littering. It started with the disovery on Saturday morning that the fountain had been knocked over and a picnic table broken beyond repair. Then we continued to find things throughout the weekend – solar light smashed beyond identification; the bridge in the mini golf area was moved; there were kids riding toy lawnmowers down the slide; kids trying to wack each other with the pool net; the list goes on. And the garbage laying around is something else. Where you finished your drink is apparently where you should drop it on the ground. And, of course every last golf ball was taken from the mini golf course.

On to the next weekend… So far the forecast looks good with some sunshine  and warm temperatures. We have a camping club returning for their second year. We have a few pay as you goers and hopefully we get some overnighters take advantage of the nice weather. This weekend is also the annual town wide garage sale in Warren which means unless there is a major catastrophy you won’t see my face around the campground on Saturday morning.

I submitted my ‘weather pic’ to the weathernetwork.com and it has now been viewed 498 times. Check it out http://www.theweathernetwork.com/your_weather/details/620/1147908/1/upload

Today is the day to restock and regroup for another weekend. After a ‘real’ weekend of working in our new concession and store all of us workers are in agreement that it is working out fabulous. And luckily there weren’t very many bugs to work out and things ran smoothly -other than my cash register deciding to freeze right at bingo time, that I could have done without. It seems to be back on track for the moment, but I don’t know how long it will last.

If we can get past today and tomorrow it looks like we should be in the clear for the weekend. They are still saying that we will see some sunshine and no rain. We won’t discuss the next couple days however.

The mini golf facelift is basically done. Yesterday’s rain has delayed the finishing touches but it definately looks much better right now. We just have to get some rails to go on the fence (which is proving difficult because the lumber store doesn’t seem to want to return calls??). We have to fix up some carpet on the holes, but unfortunately the weather isn’t going to let us do that before the weekend. We need a couple days of dry conditions before that can be finished. It looks like the gravel to touch up the picnic shelter has just arrived and then that is about the last of the major cosmetic stuff for this weekend. There still seems to be lots on the ‘to do’ lists, but it is coming along.

The RDR Grill will be having chocolate cheesecake and lemon meringue pie as our special desserts this weekend. So you can probably guess what I have been doing this morning. My pie crust have just beeped that they are done and my cheese cake is cooling as we speak. Soon time to taste test mmmmmm.

Fast forward to Friday morning and I am surprised that we have not had any cancellations because of the weather. We seem to have missed the snow and are just getting some rain. It is making things wet for set up today, but if we hopefully should dry up quickly. The last report that I heard the pool was getting close to 8OF. It doesn’t matter what the temperature is outside I expect there will still be people in it this weekend.

I just released a new recipe book this week – Ducky’s Hard Slushee Recipes. There are a few regular campers (and owners)  that have been creating some adult slushees during the last couple years that we have had the slushee machine so I decided it was time to go public with the concoctions. I have also created a prepaid slushee card, thanks to the suggestion of one of those regular campers. The idea is that you can prepay for 2-10 slushees at one time, then just bring the card in when you want to get one. It will save searching for money everytime the kids come and do the “mom can I have a slushee?”  Just hand them the card and away they go.

Kahluaccino

Iced Cappuccino

1 oz Kahlua

Irish Coffee

Iced Cappuccino

1 oz Whiskey

Mocha Mudslide

Iced Cappuccino

1 oz Kahlua

1 oz Irish Cream

Strawberry Lemonade

Strawberry Slushee

1 oz Lemon Vodka

Dacquiri

Any flavour slushee

1 oz Rum

Margarita

Any flavour slushee

1 oz Vodka

Blue Bomber

Blue Raspberry Slushee

1 oz Raspberry Sour Puss

Or 1 oz raspberry vodka

 Butter Ripple Cooler

Iced Cappuccino

1 oz Butter Ripple Schnapps

Cappuccino Creamer

Iced Cappuccino

1 oz Irish Cream

Russian Relaxer

Iced Cappuccino

1 oz Vodka

Strawberry Dreamsicle

Strawberry Slushee

1 oz Strawberry cream liquor

Mango Madness

Mango Slushee

1 oz Mango Malibu

Taste of the Tropics

Strawberry Slushee

1 oz Malibu Coconut Rum

Peachy Keen

Any Flavour Slushee

1 oz Peach Schnapps

Apparently the pool can’t open this weekend. The public health department deems it too cold/snowy/rainy  to complete our opening inspection until Monday.  As you can imagine this is more than a little frustrating when we have been working hard all week to get things ready for today. But, what can you do?

I was just doing some updating on the way we are going to run the Ducky bingo this year. Last fall we had a few test drive bingo nights and I learned some things that would make things easier. With me not being a bingo player and my caller not being a bingo player we admittedly didn’t really know what we were doing. We were just kind of winging it (pun intended) and learning as we went. There will probably still be things to learn and change as we go along this year too.

The other day when we had an actual warm, sunny day we had a jump in the number of visitors to our websitewich I kind of expected. But this morning when I checked the stats I was surprised to see that we didn’t have a huge drop yesterday. We actually had the same number of visitors as the day before.

The pool area is now bricked, cleaned and waiting. We are physically ready to open this weekend, but we have to wait for the provincial inspection to say we are ok to go. If everything works out that should be done on Friday afternoon. We have to take water samples in to get tested before the inspection is completed. The lab says I should have some results back this afternoon, but there is one test that won’t be done until  Friday afternoon. If we don’t get those results back before the inspector comes we run into a bit of a problem. Worst case scenario we will be open Mon or Tue of next week.

Pool Area after

Pool Area After

Anyone on my newsletter list will already know this, but we have just got a self serve waffle maker. The kind where you dump the batter in, flip it over and it beeps when your waffle is ready to eat. We test drove it yesterday and the waffle smell was wafting through the rec building. The smell factor should help us sell lots of waffles. They will also be included in the continental breakfast with our motel rooms. During the off season the waffles will only be available on Weekend mornings, but as the summer gets busier we will have them everyday.  Oh, by the way they passed the taste test too. Our other new addition to the concession is a popcorn maker which we also test drove yesterday. It’s just a tough job having to taste test all this stuff for quality control.

The weather is probably the hot topic of conversation around the water cooler this morning. What a crazy country. It is going to be hard to get people thinking about camping this weekend when there is a high of 4C for today. We are finally starting to get some drive up traffic though. We had one site in last night and I just got a phone call about another coming in tonight. Nothing fabulous, but at least it is something. We turned the water on at the campsites yesterday afternoon so we are fully operational there. Dennis is on his way in to pick up our RV Supplies for the store today. We are slowly stocking things and filling up the shelves.

This will be our last weekend to work out any kinks in our new store and concession area before the busy long weekend.  I had hoped to have a few campers in to kind of ease into things and get back into the swing, but it doesn’t look like that will happen unless it suddenly climbs to 25C tomorrow.

Isn’t there a saying something about sometimes you have to destroy something to make it better. That pretty much sums up what is happening at the pool area right now. We are replacing the existing grass with bricks and also expanding the fence area to make a little more room for seating.

Pool Area Destroyed

Pool Destruction

The new store area is finally complete. I spent all day today putting everything back into place and we are fully functional again.

This is the view from inside the store looking towards the main entrance to the rec building. On the left will be shelves with groceries, toiletries, candies and rubber ducky stuff. On the right just outside of the picture will be the camping and RV supplies area. Behind the counter on the right is our kitchen area with much much more space now that everything has been moved out to the store. And straight ahead is obviously our till area. We reused the original registration window so that when two of us are working we can be registering campers and helping retail customers at the same time (without tripping on each other).

The is the view looking away from the cash register. You can see all the shelves from this view now and the slush machine and coffee maker are at the back on the right. The fridge is still empty, but later this week I will start stocking it.

This is just a general picture looking towards the concession area. This reno has been a long time coming for us girls that work in this area on a regular basis. We had outgrown our space a long time ago, but we weren’t able to come up with an economical and practical solution until now. It is kind of a running joke now that people (certain seasonals in particular) can see what we have always sold and they had no idea. It just wasn’t convenient for anyone to see what was available, but hopefully that problem will be solved now.

This weekend will be our first chance to really try the area out since it is our official opening. I am almost scared to look at the forecast but it would be really nice if Mother Nature decided to cooperate.  Saturday morning is our welcome back coffee break with free coffee, juice and goodies for all campers. Then Saturday evening will be our first movie night of the season.

I skipped a few days of updates on the renos and we are actually still one step farther than I have pictures ready to post. By tomorrow I should be ready to unveil the final outcome. There is really nothing interesting about drywalling and cleaning and drywalling and cleaning. You get the picture. In addition to trying to do the reno we also had an ATV club meeting on Tuesday, a rental for a shower on Thursday and our girls birthday party this afternoon (Sat). Friday morning was the last sanding on the drywall and then we started painting. My goal was to get the primer and one coat of paint done but we kept moving and Nicole and I were able to get the walls, a display case and 2 other cabinets all painted. I just have a few touchups to do, but otherwise we are done and the baseboards were on by 9:00 pm on Friday. Whew nice to be done – almost.

This is wall paint done, tables in place but before floor paint.

We had to clean up dust once again for the party today and Dennis is now painting the floor as I speak (Sat evening).

Floor painting is done

He actually had quite a bit more paint leftover than he expected so he just kept painting. The paint that we have to use on the floor is a two part epoxy, so once you mix it up you either paint or it turns into one big hard glob and is garbage. Because we hadn’t planned originally to do the rest of the floor we had none of the other furniture stuff moved out of the way, so he had to paint around everything. It looks a little odd right now until we get some more paint to finish the entire floor in the rec building.
Just a couple counter areas to add in and we can start getting organized again. We are not sure exactly how long the floor will take to dry completely, but by Monday at the latest we will be able to move stuff back into the concession area again.
Then onto the next project – operation pool start up. The icebergs are almost melted this morning.