Camp Work Summary - Week 1 Completed

The men started working on Monday morning, April 29 repairing picnic tables and benches for Timberlake Ranch Camp. I started painting new replacement boards while Tom and Steve removed the weathered table boards and bench seats from their metal frames. By the end of the first day we had twelve picnic completed.

The ladies spent Monday deep cleaning the gift shop/snack bar. They swept up hundreds of dead flies, cleaned out metal baskets to prepare for new inventory, wiped down walls and counter tops, vacuumed and mopped floors. Also in the kitchen, the refrigerators were emptied of old food and cleaned, dusty bowls & food containers were washed and dried.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the ladies painted the girls bathroom a light gray color. On Thursday, Karen and Jan we were back in the gift shop finishing the cleaning and starting to open and organize new merchandise in order to price and display for the summer camp season. Meanwhile Cat and Christina were working in the craft room painting project tables, cutting hundreds of small cardboard pieces for a craft project and winding up yarn into balls..

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday were spent by the RVICS men working on an older gazebo near one of the many lakes around the camp. The gazebo is a hexagon structure with four original redwood benches that needed to be replaced. Our first assignment was to remove the four old benches without damaging them too much. We needed them for accurate measurements for the new benches we would construct. The benches had multiple complex angles that needed to be cut so we used both an electric table saw and electric compound miter. saw out by the job site.

The first bench took most of Tuesday afternoon to figure out. Wednesday and Thursday we continued building the othe three benches making minor adjustment to compensate for the variables associated with the gazebo roof post spacing. By the end of the day Thursday we had all the benches completed.

Friday, May 3 we all had the day off and traveled to Aurora, Nebraska to visit the Plainsman Museum. The museum had an extensive array of exhibits about the history of this county and the Great Plains of Nebraska. Exhibits included a furnished Sod House.

Once westward bound pioneers reached their destination, they had to build homes. Those homes reflected the available natural resources of the land. In forested areas, log homes were popular. Some areas in rocky terrain used stones. Some in the Southwest, where clay was plentiful, used adobe. On the Great Plains, sod houses, called “soddies,” were the most common abodes.

The humble dirt and grass homes were made with about the only natural resource available: sod. Pioneers used a special plow that could cut the dense virgin sod, then it was cut into bricks and stacked. All of it was very hard work. And a sod roof was the most challenging to build of all and could weigh more than three tons!

The 6 acre campus of this museum included a football sized building filled with old farm equipment and classic cars. There was also a one room schoolhouse which was used from 1874-1954 and a lovely fully furnished Victorian-era house built by General Delevan Bates in the 1870s. It was a fascinating museum with many incredible displays. We finished off our field trip with a Mexican lunch at Pueblo Viejo.