Losing Faith in our Fellow Man
Talk about a surprising turn of events this past weekend.
We did our camping/boating weekend at one of our favorite lakes 2 hours away from home. Busy weekend as it is everywhere over Labor Day. Next camping spot was a double with 2 5th wheels and was the meeting place for another 2 or three spots. Must have been family/friends that were all together. They all had pretty nice stuff too. Not cheap equipment and one family (mostly older teenagers or college age kids) had a Calabria ProV II wakeboat. Every evening there would be upwards of 20-30 people hanging around the campfire. Not anything out of the usual or problematic at this point.
We were camping with friend of ours that have an 12 year old, 10year old, and 3 year old. We had our 5, 3 and 16mo. with us. Great family fun right?
Well,
2nd night we were roasting marsh-mellows with the kids over the coals. Some guy with the group, pushing 50yrs old I would guess, starts piping up and yelling "look at our fire", "look at our fire". Needless to say, with 1/2 a dozen college age kids there you would think it would be one of them that was obnoxious (we'll get to that later). They kept at it how their fire was soooo big and ours needed help. At that point I knew we were in for a long weekend. When the adults are acting like asses..........you know your going to have issues!
Tucked the kids in and went to bed. Woke up to find our pile of firewood GONE. We had enough for 2 more nights but somehow it vanished. They were so hell bent on having a raging fire that they burnt all theirs and decided it was OK to start stealing from the neighboring family's pile. Me and the other Dad were beyond MAD. NO apology, no attempt to even as much as say "hi" to us the entire weekend.
They understood we knew what happened when my 5 year old asked me "why did they take our wood" and I told them that some people in this world just aren't very nice.
A couple of the kids tried to sneak some wood back to our site after we let them know what happened. They did it when we left to launch the boat and didn't realize the wives were still at camp and saw them. They also did it when most of the older adults had left on the pontoon. They had to buy some bundles at the store and I don't think they were happy about spending their money to replace OUR wood.
So we left for a day on the water. Good times as we found remote spots away from anybody to play, let the kids swim, get some skiing and tubing in. Get back to shore where I had set my box anchor and buoy only to find the buoy was gone!! Can you believe it? The "unprintable" either un-hooked the buoy and let the anchor-buddy rope fall to the bottom or they stole the whole thing altogether.
Of course I didn't see them do it, so I can't prove it. But there is no way in hell it came loose on it's own and who the hell else would mess with somebody else's stuff?
Normally the nicest people you meet are boaters and campers. Not this crew. You would think that they would have respect for other people's stuff, or the people themselves. NOT THEM. I'm still annoyed and surprised at how a group of people whom I consider old enough to be mature - acted like that. It wasn't just the kids.....It was the whole group!!
I guess I have to tell my kids that people are asses. Don't trust anybody, lock your stuff up, give people the benefit of the doubt and you'll get burned.
Sorry for the rant but I'm still in dis-belief!!
Hope you all had better luck over your Labor Day Weekend.
