Back in Uniform

(Sorry, no photos in this one!)

On our first day back in uniform, we didn’t have to be anywhere until 10:30, but the four of us met at Headquarters at 9 a.m. to start our day. We sat in the break room reading through the material on the park, and still had a lot to go through by the time we had to get moving.

We spent the day helping Ronnie and Judy, who work for the Northeastern Parks Association – the cooperating association that runs the sales of books and souvenirs in the park. We had to sort a bunch of them, load them into boxes and load those into the cars, and drive out to Miner’s Castle. The information center/bookstore there is a very small space – we will each be working there some of the time, and Munising Falls some of the time.


We had to sort through the different items, find places for them on the various shelves and hooks, look up prices, and put price stickers on everything. It took a while and was a lot of work, but it was very satisfying to get it all organized. It was another cold day – even wearing jackets we were all freezing by the time we were done! Ronnie started showing us how to use the cash register, but we stopped part way through because it was past lunchtime! Whitney and I drove back to Munising and ate our lunch at Headquarters, reading through more of the various brochures and handouts from the visitor center.

After lunch we loaded up more boxes of books and souvenirs, and drove down the street to Munising Falls, where we had to organize things all over again! There’s more space there, but less of it is for souvenir sales. Munising Falls has an actual visitor center, with several exhibits about area geology, ecology and history. The visitor center also has heating, and a thermostat…

We all had to get checked out on the cash register, and we finished just in time to be done for the day.

Today, Friday, was our first day on the front lines.

I was out at Miner’s Castle with Marc. Apparently we’re going to be there for a while, rather than switching back and forth to Munising Falls; we’ll alternate in longer chunks of time.

We had no problem setting up. A few people came through, but in the downtime between we looked through the stuff under the desk, made sure we knew what handouts were available, and talked about some of the different places in the park. Marc went out for a while to rove on the paths and at the overlook. When he got back I went and ate lunch in my car. It was cold again in the information center, even with a small heater going, and it felt good to sit in the sun!

Later I went out and walked around, and talked to some people at the upper overlook. I had some interesting conversations, talking about all the ice still out on the lake.

In the afternoon Ronnie came by with another big load of books and souvenirs – including a number of new ones! Marc and I spent the rest of the day reorganizing everything – we had to move shelves around, and it took a while to work out how to lay everything out so that it was in some kind of order – all the plant books together, all the books about the lake together, all the puzzles and games together.  We had just started pricing things when Amber, our boss, came in to see how we were doing. By the time we were all done talking, it was time to close!

We hit an unexpected snag while closing. The day before, when Ronnie was teaching us to use the cash register, she had had us put in a lot of different orders, including hitting some wrong buttons to show us what not to do. Then we left without clearing the register! So when I went to clear the register at the end of the day, it showed that we had made over $2,000 in sales! We finally had to leave most of the form blank until the next day!