Tuesday, February 13, 2007

We're a strange lot

Here, courtesy of Rick Stone, one of the MCOA rally sub-group, is an aerial view of last week's FMCA rally. Check out the scale of the layout by clicking on the picture. Now, the point of the post is that it seems RV'ers will go to almost any length to save a dollar or obtain anything that could loosely be described as "free food". Some examples from the rally.
Every morning, a thousand or so otherwise rational campers rose early, dressed warmly for 35 degree temperatures, left the comfort of their RVs, trudged half a mile each way to the Calorie Court by the Vendor Tent or waited mindlessly for one of the trams to loom out of the fog and ferry them there, and for what? To stand in line for a further twenty minutes to collect a utility style donut and a cup of fluid from a canteen style urn. Yummy - but it was free!
Even stranger is the case of the Ice Cream Social. Most of the time, our normally thoughtful camper can be expected to guard personal information, such as email addresses, phone numbers and so on, quite carefully. But, mention "free ice cream" and the combined impact of gastric turmoil and SFNS (Something For Nothing Syndrome) causes all caution to be thrown to the wind. Like lemmings, 1500 or so rally attendees immediately scribbled all of their personal information on a strip of paper, journeyed again to Cholesterol Canyon and practically climbed over one another to trade these sensitive details for a cheesy ice cream cookie. Is that strange, or what?
The ultimate parsimony however, was reserved for the last day of the rally. With SNFS apparently firmly in control, a group of creative campers came up with an incredible scheme involving the local Golden Trough. The scheme, like all great ideas, was deceptively simple. By going to dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon and eating salad for an hour and a half, it would be possible to claim a senior discount and save an entire dollar! An entire dollar for just the cost of an afternoon! It's outrageous out-of-the-box thinking like this that makes this country so great!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The nit pickin ex accountant as if there were 1,500 to 2,000 coaches there where are the other 1,000 as you only accounted for 828 coaches. A wandering mind wants to know!

Vicki and Don said...

Of course we want to save that dollar! It will buy us approximately, what? One-third of a gallon of diesel so we can travel across the entire US to attend these rallies so we can eat those free donuts and get that free ice cream!