Park Housing

We just moved into park housing! The mechanic who had been living at the park got engaged and bought a house, so it was open. We just finished moving most of the big stuff...bedroom stuff, dressers, the bathroom, and fridge. The fridge was an adventure....we had to take the handles off the fridge and the doors off the oven because of how the kitchen is set up, in order to fit the fridge into the kitchen. Then we had to put it all back together!

My husband already caught a bunch of teenagers driving out in the sand dunes (not allowed). He went out and talked to them. I saw my supervisor soon afterward, and she went out and talked to them also. Surprisingly, they were still out there!

I will post pictures soon, but the house needs to be painted first. I've been here almost a week now and saw a very cool rainbow! We've had 80-90 days without any precipitation so even though I didn't get rain where I am, it did fall in the valley. It's a start!

I worked in the fee booth this morning and we had lots of questions about the boat ramps and how much water is in the lake. I always say the lake was dry for a year and a half, so now we have more than we've had, even though it's not much at all! I like working in the fee booth because I can get other things done (prepping for an astronomy program) while I talk to the park visitors. I even had people coming in looking for hiking trails today and got to describe my favorite (sand dunes). They walked around for a while, then went up the Deadman's Creek trail.

Last time I lived in park housing, we were pretty isolated. It was 45 minutes away from the nearest town. Now, we live about 5 minutes from a really small city, and about 15 minutes from a normal-sized city. Walmart is right down the hill along with a real grocery store!

Thursday night I did a full moon hike, using an equestrian trail that is around 3 miles long. I had 8 people, including a group of five girls who chatted loudly the whole time. I had been planning to do a "sit and listen" activity, to have everyone quiet for five minutes, observing and listening for sounds of nocturnal animals. At the start of the hike, I had decided not to do it, but after listening to the group of girls for a while, I thought it would be good for this group after all. It worked! Five minutes of silence, except for frogs, crickets, airplanes, and cars on the freeway. It's so quiet in the valley you can hear the cars all the way over on the freeway!

The moon rose and I pointed out that we could all see our shadows. One guy had asked if it would really be lighter once the moon rose. That's why I like doing these hikes--giving people new experiences and showing them something they might not normally see.

The trail I chose started out as a dirt road, turned into a wide trail through tall sagebrush and sand, then turned into a narrow trail in a wide open area with short grass, sort of like a dry lake bed (which it probably was a lakebed at some point). When the moon got higher, the wide open area was lit up and we had a beautiful moonlit view of the valley. It was one of the few full moon hikes where I felt like it turned out almost perfect!