Hero Hubby on a High Cliff Holiday

We decided to stay home this weekend...  in case plans changed with my brother.  Soooo after a day of putzing around with this and that around the house, we got a phone call.

Seems some unobservant driver backed over a water spigot at the campground at High Cliff State Park.  (I am being kind in saying unobservant driver, because witnesses said she saw what she did and took off!)

Well, the ranger on duty and park superintendent took the initiative to turn off the spouting plume of water, which cut water access to that side of the park.  Mind you, we had 112 full family campsites on a holiday weekend. This limited the water access of half the campground.  Yes, they could still go to faucets on the other side or drive down to the potable faucets at the dump station to fill water containers.  But during a holiday weekend with a full park, what a pain!

As most of you know, Steve's job title is the Facilities Maintenance Specialist Advanced person for High Cliff State Park.  That means, as he puts it, "everything you see is my fault!"  haha!!!   But it's a Monday through Friday full time job with no overtime allowed and no weekends.  When things break, they have to wait till he comes in on his regular shift to fix them.  With Monday being a federal holiday, he would not be in until Tuesday to fix it!

Awww now how could he let half the park suffer?  How could he let our new campground hosts just into the second day of their one month stint to field out the complaints?  How could he push the happy families into the inconvenience of no water near their campsites?  They would have to drive to haul water back to their campsites, especially the tenting folks.

We put down our dinner forks, hopped in the car, and drove over to the park.  Good thing we hadn't gone up to my brother's cabin as planned.  We were only 14 miles away.  Steve gathered the necessary tools at his maintenance shop, and we hopped in the service John Deere gator and made our way into the campground.

Such wonderful happy families enjoying the great weather and wonderful campsites.  Just half of them were lacking access to the water spigots on their loop of the campgrounds!  Because of this:

LOL --- it's a dead water spigot! 

Because of the ancient outdated water piping system, 

there are not shut offs for each individual spigot,

it's only a main shutoff in each section,

to make it easier to drain the entire park come fall. 

Steve and the new host, Mitchell, set to work examining the post and broken pipe... and decided to cut it level, cap it off, and at least they could turn the water service back on to let the other spigots in that half of the campground work again.  It really didn't take a lot of time, and soon things were right again.

My hero!

It's only capped off and then on Tuesday when the park is more cleared out, he can turn the water off again.  Then he will have to repair the pipe and set the spigot back into place and turn things back on.


And the person who did the nasty deed had left the campground, but is still registered to a campsite.  You can bet the ranger will be over talking to her once she comes back to her site.  Ahem!

We drove around the park a bit on the John Deere and 

picked up some trash left by thoughtless people.  

We snapped a few pics here and there, 

marveling at the wonderful place Steve gets to work at. 

Here is a silly little YouTube clip I shot while we were 

climbing up the steep hill in the John Deere. 

This road used to be the only way up into the campground years ago.

The campsites sit high up on the top of the cliff, 

hence the name: High Cliff State Park.

The route is now closed to vehicle traffic 

and a nicer less steep road goes around. 

But I used to pull my little pop up camper up this hill to come here camping with my little girls many years ago!  And we would climb this tower to look over Lake Winnebago.

Yup, it's a great park to work at----

Even if stupid people run over water spigots! 

On our way out of the park, we stopped by The Chubby Seagull for a wonderful hand dipped ice cream cone!  Now THAT is worth the whole hassle of working on his day off Steve said.  His boss can just pay him in ice cream cones for overtime and he would be happy.  LOL

Once we got home, we finished our dinner, did a few lawn things, and now are relaxing with a bit of wine out on the front porch.  The occasional pop pop pop of a few home fireworks displays are shooting off, but nothing major so our dogs are just fine with us at home.

This is a rough time of the year on dogs, and many go missing because of the loud noises--- so please folks, make your pets comfy and secure during this crazy holiday!

And because I needed an excuse to post a few more cute pics of my dogs, here they are: