Gayle's Blog ~ Our Travels Across the U.S.: Easter, July 4, Halloween & Christmas at Yogi Bear Jellystone Park, Waller, Texas

Without Directors here anymore, the kids and other workers look to Jim & me for guidance. (Yikes!) I do not make decisions without talking with the three who worked here last year, and the two other workampers who owned a campground for 20 years, and getting input from them. Kathleen especially is a wealth of knowledge; I would guess she is in her early 70's but has the energy of a young woman and seems to really enjoy working in activities. She is quite an asset and if our new managers do not listen to her about what occurred last year in Activities with the pancake breakfasts, games, and theme weekends which the guests love, they are fools. Unfortunately, none of the three were here last Easter, but started working around Memorial Day, so we don't know how last Easter went. We will see how it all plays out this summer.

Here is a picture of the parents and kids waiting for the hunt, and did not even get all of them in the picture.

Here are a couple of pictures of the amount of people here this weekend. And I'm told this is what it will be like the whole summer once school is over.

The campground was pretty filled up with almost 700 campers here. The Easter egg hunt was a fiasco, even though we thought we had it well planned out. All it takes it one impatient parent who yells "I know where the eggs are, follow me." Yep, that's what happened.

We had over 197 people come for our pancake breakfast this morning. No one ordered more pancake mix and we only had about four packages in the pantry. We could go through 6 packages on a slow weekend. (A package is about the same size as a bag of flour.) We had to go to the office and clean off their shelves of their pancake mix, and luckily did not run out, but we did run out of bacon and sausage. So even though it's not really my job, I gave the manager a Sysco order today so we don't run out again.

Kathleen with BooBoo

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July 4 weekend was a lot of fun. Every weekend had a theme and of course this weekend was the Stars & Stripes Weekend. We had lots of different activities lined up, along with rides on the Jellystone Express and the Wet-n-Wild Wagon. This was one of the favorites -- people climbed on board the wagon with buckets of water and water guns; the wagon was hauled around the park and guests would shoot each other with water guns and guests at their sites squirted back with water hoses. We also had a golf cart & bike parade Saturday night.

Lining up for the Parade

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I wish I had more pictures of our Halloween weekends. We have five weekends of Halloween activities. We had a few favorite activities ~~ there was the Magic Pumpkin Patch. The store sold "magic pumpkin seeds" and on Saturday at 10am the kids took their magic pumpkin seeds to the Magic Pumpkin Patch to "plant" their seeds. As soon as they were done, we frantically set out the same amount of pumpkins as there were seeds. That took about an hour, and then the kids were able to come back to the patch and get their pumpkins. They were then able to take their pumpkins to the activity center where we had plates of paint for them to paint their pumpkins.

The other activity that was a big hit (besides the haunted houses) was a costume contest. We had that set up by ages and then family. There were some fantastic costumes; many went all out on them. We had four judges in the audience and we gave out ribbons for the best costumes.

We had a contest for the best decorated site and also a golf cart parade before trick or treating and going into the haunted house. Here are some pictures of our haunted house area.

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By Christmas things really slowed down and we were only open on weekends with minimal activities. The main thing we did for Christmas was have Santa and Yogi in the activity center where children were able to come and sit on Santa's lap. Some of the activities we had were a Christmas Card toss, decorate Christmas cookies, and of course, rides on the Jellystone Express.