Renting Dirt: An unfertilized (no BS) look at what it takes to run a campground and RV park
By Andy Zipser
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About this ebook
The average length of time before an RV campground is put up for sale is just seven years—and as it turns out, there's a good reason for that. While campers are out to experience fresh air, bucolic surroundings and the easygoing camaraderie of fellow travelers, the people who create that environment are often over-worked, under-paid and stressed out. And to make matters worse, their efforts are too readily dismissed as just "renting dirt."
This frank, first-hand narrative describes one couple's journey from wide-eyed occasional campers to full-time owners and operators of a medium-sized campground and RV park in the Shenandoah Valley. Buying in early 2013, as the campground industry was just regaining its feet after the Great Recession, the Zipser family soon realized that their biggest challenge wasn’t managing the property—it was managing the people involved with it: campers with diverse and often unrealistic expectations, a franchise system led by a brain trust with minimal boots-on-the-ground experience, and a transient workforce with employees stuck on the bottom rung of the economic ladder.
Andy Zipser
Prior to being a campground owner, I worked for nearly 30 years in the newspaper industry, starting as a reporter on a couple of Long Island community weeklies that paid 10 cents a column-inch—an unfortunate practice that discouraged concise writing. From there I worked my way up the journalistic food chain, parts of which no longer exist, or barely so: The Myrtle Beach Sun-News, The Phoenix Gazette, the New Times in Phoenix, The Roanoke Times & World News, The Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. I then segued into another dying institution, organized labor, by becoming editor of The Guild Reporter, former official publication of The Newspaper Guild and now just a memory.Although at my journalistic peak I specialized in long-form journalism, writing stories and investigative pieces that sometimes exceeded five thousand words, Renting Dirt is my first attempt at writing a book. It’s a modest effort, I know, but its natural audience is modestly sized as well. I may get more ambitious once this package has been put to bed and I can stop obsessing about it, perhaps by looking at the demise of print journalism. Or perhaps by turning to fiction writing.Meanwhile, after selling our campground in May, my wife, Carin, and I bought a house in nearby Staunton, VA so we could be close to our grandsons--and because it's a helluva nice town.
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