Alabama - Day 28 - Campground drama

I-65 RV Park
Saturday, 28 December 2019

I'd intended to spend a nice, quiet day in the campground, walking the dogs occasionally and spending most of the day catching up on my blog.  But that plan was torpedoed from the beginning by those stray dogs.

First, I couldn't take my dogs out for their early morning walk because I had to assume those dogs would be around.  Instead, at 6:00 AM I was packing up the RV's cabin and unplugging our connections and driving off down the road to a local grocery store, hoping I could find some place to walk the dogs while I waited for it to open.  It worked out okay, but what a nuisance.

Back at the campground, I waited for the office to open at 9:30 and went down to have a heart-to-heart talk with them about those dogs and my injuries and what I think was their negligence.  The campground manager was in the office, fortunately, and she took it all very seriously.  She took photos of my bandaged, then unbandaged injuries, called the local police station, and said she'd deal with it that day.  I pointed out that my dogs couldn't leave our RV while those dogs were around, and if they weren't gone by noon, I needed to find another campground and wanted a refund.

Campgrounds hate to give refunds and most, like this one, have a sign posted prominently that says they won't.  But I thought, with my injuries, I had a pretty good case and so did the manager.  But she knew she'd have to argue with the owners and was hoping for a better solution.

She told me those dogs weren't abandoned at all but instead lived just down the road.  We speculated that the owners didn't bother to tie up their dogs but just let them roam around, and that someone in the campground was feeding them because otherwise why were they hanging around here so diligently for so long.

Nothing had happened by 11:00, when I absolutely had to walk the dogs, so once again I unplugged and went down the road to a different grocery store and walked them around a different parking lot.  But when we went back to the campground, I pointed out to the manager that I couldn't reasonably keep that up.  And it was ridiculous to think that's what I'd have to do for our before-bed walk so - - when were those dogs going to be gone?

I checked with her again a couple of hours later and was really feeling the pressure to have a resolution one way or another to this situation, and she said she was waiting on a return call from the police officer in charge but she thought the dogs had left the campground.

So I took my dogs out for a walk and - guess what? - found that those dogs hadn't left the campground at all but instead once again showed up to check out my dogs.

I real quick hustled mine back to the RV before yet another incident happened and went straight to the manager and said no they're not gone, they're right here.  And she called the police and said they're here.  And the police promised instant service.  So the manager and I stood around, with me shaking a little bit from the nearness of my recent encounter between those dogs and mine, waiting for the police.  And they did come fairly quickly.  A cop and the local city employees that deal with stray dogs.

They managed to catch the 2 dogs fairly quickly, stick them in the back of the city pickup truck, and promised they'd keep them until the county animal shelter had room to take them.  The cop said he'd keep trying to identify the owners - apparently he didn't know who they were as the manager had thought so who knows whether the dogs would have ever left if not for me pushing.

At some point when I'd gone elsewhere to walk my dogs, the manager checked around the campground and learned that those dogs had been causing problems for other residents - yowling all night under one man's trailer, growling at another woman who was walking her dog, that sort of thing.  So I did the campground a favor for pushing the issue and, given my extreme inconvenience, I think they should have given me an extra night free.  But she didn't offer, and by then all I really wanted to do was get out of there.

From then on, every time I took the dogs out, all 3 of us kept expecting those dogs to appear.  After all, they'd appeared each of the 3 previous times we'd tried to walk there.  And even though I'd actually seen them driven off and knew for certain they wouldn't be back soon, I kept worrying about it.  I guess it was a mild case of PTSD for all of us.

But with all that, I certainly didn't get the nice peaceful hours of work in that I'd hoped for.  Instead, once the dogs were gone, I spent some time trying to find another campground to move to.  And found that most of the ones that looked at all comfortable were completely booked up.  I didn't expect that so many folks would go camping for New Year's Eve, but that seems to be the case.  But I finally got one and reserved a spot until January 1st, hoping we could relax there and I could get caught up.

But what an experience.