Headin’ to the Fairgrounds

Dear Friends,

We be leaving Tall Chief RV Resort today. An interesting, unusual park,
set in a heavily wooded area between Fall City and Redmond, Washington.
With 189 sites, each site is a pad in a little clearing, almost hidden
from your neighbors. They are all back-in sites, no pull-throughs, but
it doesn’t matter because no one is stopping in for one night only.
Tall Chief is a Western Horizons membership park and folks stay for a
week up to six months.

This is the park that sells adult diapers in the office for incontinent
swimmers. There are so many rules in this park, the rules section of
the map has three pages of extra rules. The rules always end with
“Enjoy your stay!”

I had good sales in this park last year when I worked it alone. We
grossed a thousand more this year with Davey’s help. Lots of times
people may sort of want to buy an ad but don’t because they don’t know
how to make one. They don’t have good language skills. Dave makes the
ad based on a phone book ad, or billboard, or signs on the shop window
– I have it in hand as a sample when I make my presentation. It works
almost every time.

We FINALLY got a level five commitment from the Deschutes County
Fairgrounds to map the fairgrounds and their new 150 site RV park. This
job is a real prize. Redmond hosted two huge rallies this summer and is
one of the two fairgrounds in the country to get the biggest rallies.
The other one is in Perry, Georgia, and our VP of Sales does that map.
We’re pretty pleased.

This job has jammed up our schedule, though, and we didn’t get to spend
the 4-5 days with our family in Seattle-Tacoma. It’s hard to leave my
92 year old mother.

Dave’s sister came up to Tall Chief and took us to the Snoqualmie
Forest Theater. An amphitheater set in the woods, the musical was “Meet
Me In St. Louis,” and it was as hoot. It rained all the way through Act
III but no one left. We just hunkered down and shared umbrellas. After
the show we joined the wet cast for an excellent grilled salmon dinner.
A fun evening.

We went to our first Whole Foods organic market in Redmond, WA (home of
Microsoft). It was truly awesome. The produce is displayed so totally
artfully I wanted to take pictures but they wouldn’t let me. Sushi
bars, coffee bars, soup bars and a deli … we were agog. We bought
produce there but had to stop at Albertson’s on the way home to buy
groceries. Whole Foods doesn’t have things I recognize, like Best Foods
Mayo and Brawny paper towels … I’d have to take a class before I
could shop there! It was a real urban experience!

Here it is Labor Day, we are 95 miles headed east out of Seattle and
the westbound traffic is backed up and crawling … another urban
experience!

We’re seeing some maple trees turn red. A few yellow leaves fall off.
It always reminds me of an old Shel Silverstein cartoon titled “A Dance
to Autumn.” A lithe hippie girl in a long skirt, barefooted, twirls
through three panels and in the fourth panel a single leaf flutters
down and she raises her face and sighs, “He heard!”

Love to all,