The month of July is nearly finished. It seems like only a couple of days ago we arrived for our second tour of duty in the campground at William O'Brien State Park. During July we have single-handedly kept the medical profession in MN afloat, made lots more trips to Good Will, and moved once again into a smaller storage unit. Our supply of stuff keeps shrinking and pretty soon at this rate we will be down to only one change of underwear.

On Thursday, we will be moving to Beaver Creek Valley State Park near Caledonia, MN for campground hosting through Labor Day. We had thought of maybe trying to stay here at William O'Brien since we are not aware of another host moving in to take our place. We still have stuff to do here in the Cities, our most favorite event of the year runs during August, the MN State Fair, and I just learned today that I might need some fixing on one of my eyes that may complicate our schedule. All of these things work better from William O'Brien. But we made a commitment to Beaver Valley and quite frankly we are tired of the campground and non-duties at William O'Brien and ready to move on. And, that is the whole point of being a full time RVer.

We are having second thoughts about campground hosting. We like more action. We are hoping the range of duties of a campground host varies with the staff and the agency administering the campground. We are now looking back at our experiences at Lake Bemidji SP in June and realizing that we had much more to do there and were relied upon more than here at William O'Brien. We felt we could have done more in Bemidji, but now that we have experienced William O'Brien again, we appreciate better the role we played in Bemidji. We suspect each park will be different because each park is run by different individuals albeit the same organization. We still have not been able to lose the feeling that we need to be hard driving as if we were still working in our careers. We need to remind ourselves more often that we are retired and volunteers, and staff and campground operation dysfunctions are not our problems. We can say the words but we can't make ourselves believe the words. And so, a month at a time is probably long enough for us, and it is time to move on.

A week ago Tuesday was National Hot Dog Day, and we celebrated by going to Stillwater and having a Chicago dog. It doesn't take much for us to pull out all stops and go wild.

The advantage of being at William O'Brien SP is that we are close to our kids. Rhys and one-half of the grandkids visited one Saturday afternoon for brats and a bicycle ride and s'mores. Let the good times continue.

It's Logan (13), Rhys (almost 40...gulp), Conner (11), and Nana (no age available.)