CLYDE smelled fishy.
What's a membership RV Park and Why?
Plus other useless crap you don't want to know.
It was now 1990. I was 51 and Dollie 49. Still full of piss and vinegar. We were making plans for retiring in 1994 but still taking as many weekend camping trips as possible. Got advertisements to camp free at a new membership grand opening at the same RV park where that nudist campground used to be.
For years we'd been camping along Lake Michigan, in the Dunes State Parks, having fun walking the long miles of beaches nude or nearly so. Odds are we'd never get the chance to go up that way after moving. Be fun to check out the old campground and see how that nudist loop looks now. We knew that part had been torn down, as we spent our last time there so long ago.
We also had friends south of Detroit and knew of many scenic and interesting places to go in lower Michigan. Maybe we'd go to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village again! I called and made our reservations for July 1990.
'The Old Gogenfart Farm, the final chapter'.
July again, the RV park had changed dramatically. Not only a different name but the place looked totally different with nice paved streets and RV sites. The only catch was we were gonna have to waste a few hours on Saturday listening to a sales pitch. Much like those Condo sales talks we hated. Hell we've sat through many of those and said no many times.
Well, I did get suckered in twice when we originally joined a membership system and then another $5000 upgrade. At the time we'd planned on selling everything and actually living in the membership system full time. With up to four weeks allowed in each park at a time it sounded great.
Like everything that's too good to be true, it wasn't too good! By the time we retired many of those 'Home Parks' closed down, restrictions about holidays and special events, and other crap, narrowed down those extended stays.
Others who were already retired began finding it difficult to find an RV park to move to next. Too much crap to worry about as they got older. Many ended up in State parks and expensive private RV parks in between stays at those member parks. Wally World parking lots didn't sound like a plan to us. I wasn't about to say yes to anymore additional memberships.
We already had $10,000 and over $300 monthly membership fees wrapped up in this system since the early 80's. When camping at the parks was free, or $1 a night at some, and we went many weekends a year, it seemed to be a good deal. Even then, it wasn't free camping.
Picture a country club. You pay to join, you pay your annual dues, you pay to play golf, eat, and party.
Fast forward to retiring. There were no membership parks near us so we just stopped sending our dues. Can't do that! Funny, if we didn't pay our dues they threatened to cancel us yet when we wanted to get out of the system we can't. Okay, I just stopped paying and after a bunch of threats we were canceled. That was easy even though we did loose a lot of money.
Still for many years it was the best thing we could have done. Great up scale RV parks with free baby sitters in the way of activity directors and kiddy lodges for our kids to hang out while we played locally.
But back to 1990, me 51 and Dollie 49. We arrived at the membership RV park, got a great RV site, and signed up for the required sales talk. Everyone seemed to be dressed for a family affair. Jeans and mostly long sleeved shirts, men and women alike, in July!
We wore short shorts and Dollie some sort of cleavage poppin top. We seemed to be getting stares from the others as we parked our rig and walked down some of the paved campground loops. We decided to take a walk down to where the old nudist campground loop was.