Gate keeper.......

8:01 am - Saturday - 29 F degrees, 71% humidity, wind 5 mph out of the south.....forecast high is 63 F degrees with partly cloudy skies.  We were awakened early this morning by rude, inconsiderate customers who chose to arrive here at 3:15 am.  The noise they were making trying to get into a site woke up everyone within 200 yards of them.  After 30 minutes they were still making noise, so I got dressed and walked a 100 yards down the aisle to ask them to shut off their engine and lights and just plug in until the sun rises.  The woman begins to yell hysterically at me saying over and over....."We are newbies....this is only our second time out!" .....after listening to her yell this mantra over and over at least three, or four times I replied...."Being a newbie has nothing to do with what you are doing.......you chose to arrive here at 3:15 am in the morning and wake up all your neighbors.......you are just rude and inconsiderate.....don't make me call the Sherriff".....then walked back to the Newell......as I walked the gentleman turned off his lights and engine, but I could still hear the woman talking loudly......she must be a peach back home.....wherever home is.

I had every intention of getting back over to Section E to finish painting tent site directional arrows and site posts, but I decided to install the gate at the entrance of the 'Dog Park'......of course like a lot of projects I have done over the years this one took much longer than I expected.  For one thing I didn't know the gate I had chosen to use, which was also the last unused gate, had two broken 'L' joints.....at opposing corners, so I had to figure out how to fix those (see picture below showing one of the broken 'L' joints) before I could install it.......

 One broken joint repaired.....

 ......and the other

......you will note I used different methods to fix each broken 'L' joint and that was dictated by the parts we had on hand.....I would have preferred to repair both corners using the brackets in the second picture, but we only had 3 of them.  At any rate the search for parts, and then the repair took close to two hours, then it was time to install the gate.....

......first I had to pound a 10' long steel pole into the ground until only 4' were above ground....this would be the pole to which I would clamp a 2" diameter, 4' long piece of galvanized pipe.......then I had to take about 10 feet of barbed wire to anchor the assembly........

....when I went to cut the 2" galvanized pipe I found that the round cutting blade on the pipe cutter had a flat spot, so I had to rob a replacement blade from a smaller pipe cutter.....that took a while, but I got that 4' piece pipe cut, then had to cut another 3' piece of 2" galvanized pipe to sink in the ground into which I would slip a 4' piece of 1.5" galvanized pipe for the gate latch to rest against when the gate is closed.  The gate opening is about 48" wide......our golf carts are 44" wide so by removing the latch post I can drive the cart through the opening if needed....

The finished product

.....in all it took me about 6 hours to repair the broken gate, to fabricate the hardware on which to hang it, and then to install it, but it came out better than I expected based on the fact that I had to scrounge and/or fabricate parts for everything.  Once again I was able to spend the day working on a project of which no one wanted any part, and the time just melted away.

I clocked out just before 5 pm, and TLE was home about 40 minutes later.......just as I was getting out of my 30 minute HOT shower......she made me two quesadillas for dinner and we watched 'Gold Rush'......apparently I fell asleep in my recliner sometime before 9 pm and TLE woke me up a little after 10 so I could go to bed.....bless her heart!

Thanks for stopping by!