Strong winds & idiots

When we got back to the park yesterday afternoon we were immediately accosted by a very earnest couple who I had never seen before but who must be neighbours in some direction. They had a long tale about some idiot in a very large motorhome who had whacked the side of the bus with the tail end of their trailer. As they got further into the description we recognized the rig as the one that was parking its trailer next to the fence as we entered the park. There's not a bunch of damage to the bus - a couple of scratches that I might not have noticed otherwise. It seems that this pair had blundered their way through the park whacking both us and another coach further up the lane. At that time we had a family staying next to us with a lawyer in their party and Kim had made sure to get all the particulars of the offending coach. It sounds as though she also tried to avert the accident but bozo wasn't paying enough attention to his surroundings to either notice her waving her arms at him or hear her screaming at him until it was too late.

So no big deal -- I said to Marilyn "I hope they come to apologize but there's not much we can do anyway." Sometime in the next couple of years, after we get back from Alaska, we will get the bus repainted and all those minor scratches will disappear at that time. They waited long enough but much later in the evening Mr. & Mrs. Bozo came along to "apologize", although the words "we're sorry" never actually escaped their lips. In fact, after a brief explanation of what had happened they launched into a long series of excuses about why it really wasn't their fault. Part of that explanation included the phrase "after all --- we're 65 feet long". That was the limit of my patience. I explained that perhaps if their rig was really too long to maneuvre in a campground then maybe they should unhook their trailer before entering the campground. That provoked another outburst which concluded with "where are we supposed to unhook?" "Right where you eventually did would have been good. AND WOULD HAVE KEPT YOU FROM WANDERING AROUND THE CAMPGROUND BASHING INTO PEOPLE!!"

This morning I discovered that the reason they pull a 25' trailer behind a 40' motorhome is so they can haul a couple of those loud dune buggy affairs that sound like a pissed off bumblebee and serve no obvious purpose other than to annoy the neighbours and rip up sand dunes so that they drift worse. But I digress. We also noticed that they have an automatic awning exactly like Mel would like to have. Apparently they either don't have the automatic retract feature on it to protect it against wind or they are too stupid to enable that function. The wind has been howling here today but so far it hasn't ripped their awning off. Too bad.

To say the wind is blowing is a serious understatement. The wind is howling loud enough to rock the bus. There's a serious surf blowing in on the beach and only a few beachgoers are dedicated enough to be out there. Mel & Billie want to walk into town to the Dead Fish restaurant for supper but I don't think that's going to happen unless the weather perks up PDQ.