The extensive list of rules for the Coulee City Campground are posted next to the computerized kiosk that accepts bills or credit cards for payment. Pick an empty spot. Park your rig. Pay for your spot. Once paid, you have one hour to establish your camp. It’s so easy to do, and it turns out, so easy to fake. If you thought you hated “that guy” in line in front of you waiting for hard to get tickets only to find that he is holding a place in line for his 12 friends, then you know the scheme.
The “one hour rule” is meant to prioritize camping for people who are physically at the campground, over those who may arrive in a few hours or tomorrow, or a few days after tomorrow, but have a friend on-site who saved them a seat. It is called first-come, first-serve and it’s highly desirable to people like us, who like to stay loose with our dates and routes. When parks offering a reservation system are filled 6 months or more in advance, especially on a holiday weekend, first come first serve spots are our favorites. First come first serve seat savers are not our favorites.
Some people will use a reservation system to hold reservations at multiple parks over multiple dates knowing they can cancel without significant penalty. Parks that charge the full amount up-front usually credit back all but one night stay if you cancel in advance. But those that only take a deposit of one night just keep the money if you no-show so some people don’t even bother to cancel. The loss of one night’s stay is the cost of insurance that a site is available if they want it. This becomes obnoxious when staying at a “fully booked” park and finding dozen or so spots unfilled. As long as we are on a rant, reservation fakers are not our favorites either.
In extremely well run campgrounds, like Wayfarers in Montana’s Flathead Lake region or Admiral Baker in San Diego, the campground hosts call the incoming campers one to three days before their arrival to confirm. When the unused sites are discovered, the camp host releases them on a first-come, first-serve basis. It all comes down to the camp hosts; a position that we really do not understand but are considering as a future fourth career. Some are greeters, van drivers or firewood salesmen, while others clean the toilets in exchange for free lodging. Sign us up for the former, we have had enough of the latter for a life time.
Coulee City Campground is an oddity on the shores of Banks Lake. The town itself is COVID closed, save the two gas stations, one shopette, a post office and an unusually large volunteer fire department. Their city park, complete with marina, beach, playground and large campground seems oversized for such a small town. With close to a hundred full hook-up sites renting at $35/night and even more tenting at $20, it must generate good revenue for the small city of 575 residents. We arrived ten days prior to the big 4th of July weekend partly to exhaust the Grant County area and partly to lock in shelter. Open sites were plentiful so we picked shade and view to watch the local action. Little did we know we had inadvertently picked the center site of a first-come first serve saving spots scheme.
Four days before the holiday weekend the campground began to fill, but not around us. One Forest River Class A pulled in two spots over but the sites all around us remained empty. Every couple of hours, a new rig would pull into one of them then scamper off to pay at the kiosk. Forest River would pay a visit to the new arrival and the new arrival would depart. And so it went for for four days straight. Just when we were getting ready to meet our neighbor, the new neighbor would depart, banished to dry camping.
By the third of July, the campground was in full holiday swing. Every site was taken – except for the two adjacent to us. When the camp host rolled by in his golf cart, we inquired. “They are paid for,” he explained. “They are occupied but the rig is probably a boat, and that boat is on the lake.” “For five days and nights in an 18 foot Bowrider?” Eric asked, looking at him like he was insane. He looked back like “that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” This camp host did not seem to have rules enforcement as part of his host duties.
Under the intense pressure of an off-hand “that’s odd” side-look from Eric, he broke down. It was the people from the coast (Seattle) he said. They have enormous families, and just choose a park to take over. That was news to us, but come to think of it everyone around us was speaking a foreign language that we could not place. Perhaps it was Seattle-eze. Forest River was the lead “reserver,” arriving early and paying for dozens of spots on the kiosk through independence weekend. In this case, the reserver first-come first-serve’d for his contingent. The contingent camped in new 35 foot rigs; towed new ski boats. The packaging from their new grills, new camp chairs, new deep fryers, new bicycles, and new EZ ups filled the dumpster. They were a cadre of under-30 somethings with a lot of under 10s all camping for the first time, it would appear. COVID had shutdown all other vacation plans. 2020 was the summer for camping.
The camp host was overwhelmed. Generously we saw that he wanted to accommodate everyone that had driven to the park. Cynically we felt, perhaps by the way he personally escorted them to the kiosk, that he wanted to accommodate everyone that had 35 bucks. In any case, the end result was tents, boats, RVs and trucks wedged into every sliver of space available. Confronting the folks abusing the reservation system was not in the cards but maximizing Coulee City revenue as Ozark style mayhem descended became priority one. Roxie may not be the biggest 5th wheel out there, but hopefully she was big enough to provide us shelter us from what we were sure was the COVID party of eastern Washington.
Finally, late on the night of the 3rd, the final friend, or family member, or distant relative, or whomever, arrived. They pulled in to their “saved” spot adjacent to us completing our encirclement. Like the Alamo, we self quarantined in Roxie with the windows closed and the air handler on. Unlike the Alamo, hopefully we would leave this place early the next morning. Thus, 4th of July was a good year to watch the Macy’s special on TV. The noise from the adjacent campground was muffled through the walls of our rig, but 30 unmasked people and kids can only be so quiet. We thought we heard them arguing about how in the world Forest River failed to “reserve” the site Roxie held right in their center. But, then again, our Seattle-eze is poor, so maybe it was about how to work the deep fryer.
