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Our first shift

So, as I had previously mentioned in a post, I had volunteered myself and Stacy to help out at the local Visitor's Center. 

As with so many things, an idea that sounded good at the time isn't necessarily still a good one months later! 

In January, when we walked in and talked about signing up, volunteering at the VC seemed like it would be fun, once or twice a month,...... maybe. 
However, even though I was the one that wanted to give this a try, Stacy's name stood out to the current, and retiring, manager, and she thought Stacy was the perfect person to replace her! 
We went to the meeting of all the volunteers in May and met everyone else. Stacy was introduced as the new co-manager and ideas and issues of running a facility with entirely volunteer staff were gone over. 
We scheduled our first shift for last Sunday afternoon, June 21st, father's day. 
With Stacy's trips to Boise that was the first day we really could. 

The day arrived and we were there a little early for our first shift. Stacy went over the logs from previous volunteers shifts and I tried to figure out the building's Air Conditioning controls. With no openable windows it's a/c or fry! I was disappointed to find that the windows don't face the correct direction to be able to receive XM satellite radio, and the stereo in the office doesn't pick up any of our 3 area FM channels very clearly at all. 
No matter, my XMP3 Satellite radio records 5 channels whenever it's on in my office, which is most of the time I'm at work so I'll take that radio next time and we'll just listen to recorded stuff from that. 


Above- this angle is really showing the public bathrooms at the facility. The part of the building in the back is the VC with a meeting room on the top floor. 
Below- as you walk in the VC, the volunteer sits at the desk immediately to the left to answer any questions, if they know the answer!, as well as have a sign in book. Stacy sitting at the desk this day.



Below- some of the many available travel guides, this wall is for the local area and closer surrounding areas. The photo I took of the 'International wall'  from this angle, to my left, was too blurry, so, maybe next time!
But you can see the comfy couches one can 'take a break on' and more reading material. There's also a TV to the right of those couches with area travel DVDs available to watch if so inclined. 


And how was it? 

Stressful! 

In our 4 hour Sunday afternoon shift, we had 20 people come in looking for answers. 4 of them were bicycle tourers, 2 going South and then West to Seattle, eventually. 
The other 2 going North into Canada while biking the "Selkirk Loop" which is an International driving, or riding, loop that runs through North Idaho, Southern B. C. Canada, and Northeastern Washington. It's 350 miles give or take and is an area and national highlight. You can check out the site at www.selkirkloop.com

Those cyclists, a guy and his wife, were checking into camping for the night. As it stays light till after 9:30 now, he wanted to get as far as he could as he wanted to be done with the ride before the predicted record heat hit by the next weekend. 

We looked and looked, went over everything we could find on hand and there just weren't any camping spots the way they were traveling. Nothing from town North to Canada except one spot that would have required they made a detour they didn't want to make. We suggested the County Fairgrounds, as there is free camping there for tents or RVs but they wanted to move on so we helped all we could and they left. We figured as they had mentioned, since they were shifting to a less traveled side road they were probably going to just get up in the forest off the road and camp wherever they could find a spot. Stacy gave them her cell number and told them if they came across any problems we'd bring our truck and get them! But they must have been OK as we didn't get any calls. It could have been their T-Mobile service too, as there isn't any in this area!

The other two cyclist were older gents, one 71, it was his birthday the 21st, and his friend 74. They had been trying to make a cross country ride but had run into difficulty with bad weather and mud that damaged one of their bikes in another area along their route. All fixed now but sticking to mostly paved roads, they wanted to camp at the Fairgrounds. 
Stacy called as the only stipulation to staying free there is letting the Sheriff dispatch aware you're staying there. The 'younger' man, wanted to go find a pharmacy as he was having some problems with the heat. As there are no pharmacies in the old downtown, we volunteered to take him the 3 miles to Safeway for the pharmacy so he could get what he needed. I drove him up to the store and back. Then they went over and camped. 

We also had several couples come in asking about area hiking trails. Guess what, we didn't know of many of them! 
We've mainly taken our quads (4-wheelers) up forest roads in our area, and there's lot's of those forest roads all over the place in the mountains but we've not done too much hiking ourselves, nor do we know any people that are avid hikers or we'd probably have better information. We did have several handouts available and showed general directions to the places they wanted to know about. 

Everyone else wanted the more general stuff we kinda knew about, how far to here or there, what's a good place to eat at on a Sunday afternoon, how late is the Canadian border crossing open? 

As we now know what we might come across now while there, we took action to get more information to have on had for the next time. Stacy used her iPad with the VC WiFi and let people look at the satellite images from Google Earth to get a better idea about where they were going and I got some Canadian maps from AAA when I was down to CDA on Tuesday. We checked about any camping in the area in case we didn't know of all the places and I got a couple of camping guides, also from AAA, so we came go over those with people should they ask. 

Our shift went by very quickly. We're planning on getting a couple of Sundays each during July and August, maybe. 
September we'll be traveling for work together and just this week one of our staff went to a new job in the County so Stacy's not sure she'll be able to continue on as the manager. 
Almost all the volunteers are already retired folks, I'm guessing the idea of our volunteering was a little premature for us. 
Summer is a busy time for us with Stacy traveling often for her state level things and for me having the weekends to get all the maintenance done for vehicles and property. And both of us, getting firewood for winter, getting trash wood up and to the dump. So much to do and so little time!

Well, we'll have to see how it goes. Will we be volunteering next summer? Don't know. 

But, if you're in the area, check out the International Visitor's Center! 







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