Today we awakened with absolutely no plans to do anything and we carried them out to the fullest. We enjoyed the air conditioned comfort of our trailer only venturing outside long enough to realize we wanted to go back inside. It is very hot and very humid. The air conditioners are putting out solid streams of condensate while keeping us comfortable inside our beloved cheesy palace.
We were able to establish scratchy telephone communications so we made a series of reservations for the upcoming month or so. We have found that despite our belonging to several large campground organizations which are all owned by the same entity, the process of making reservations is completely befuddling, chaotic and bizarre.
We belong to groups known as Thousand Trails, Resort Parks International, Encore and Enjoy America. It would seem to the unknowing outsider that one would call Enjoy America to make an Enjoy America campground reservation. The outsider would be two-blocked at this point because you need to actually call Resort Parks International to make an Enjoy America reservation. Thousand Trails publishes a guide which allegedly shows all the Thousand Trails campgrounds numbering some 85 in number. Actually, without bothering to tell anyone, they have included some Encore parks in their guide. Thousand Trails parks are supposed to be free to Thousand Trails elite members, like us, but that is not necessarily true because we are charged what turns out to be a pretty substantial costs for the secret Encore parks shown in the Thousand Trails guide.
To make things interesting, as Thousand Trails elite members, we get a 20% discount on Encore parks if we make the reservation through the Encore or Thousand Trails reservation agency. Strangely, if we reserve our Encore destination through Resort Parks International, we get a 30% discount on the same reservation. Thousand Trails also sent us a Ready Camp Go card which allegedly saves us some unknown amount of money if we tell whoever is on the other end of the line that we have the card. Sometimes we get a 50% reduction in cost at Encore parks using this mechanism but sometimes we don’t. To make things more challenging, if we use the RPI reservation service they charge us $2 per reservation and add the caveat that changed or cancelled reservations have a $25 fee attached to them. Therefore, if one makes a reservation through RPI and subsequently finds he/she could have realized a bigger discount using another service, any gains will be cancelled out by the $25 penalty for cancelling an RPI reservation. Simple, eh?
After staggering through this maze of mysterious turns, twists and dead ends, we were ultimately able to make reservations (possibly not getting all the discounts available) through the first of September. I hope we don’t need to cancel any of them. We should be hunky-dory all the way from Kentucky through Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and finally into Rapid City, SD.