I usually try to make 3 a year at the least.
In the past that was all I could make because I worked 60 hours a week sometimes 70-80 and my weekend usually consisted of either getting sunday off or getting half of sunday off.
To make it to any work day or any cruiser event I had to request time off, which having my direct boss 1000 miles away was never a quick way to do it.
I know many in this club work long hours plus long commutes and many also have kids so I would almost never expect to see them at work days because time with family and your kids will always come first and should.
Now I have the opposite problem..... lots of time but have to juggle my resources as I don't make near what I used to. I still run into scheduling conflicts as many of the side jobs I do are on a saturday but its easy to just not take the job if I want to go to a work day.
The double edge to that sword is the sheer cost of the gas for me to drive to Uwharrie at around $70 out of pocket to go work.
That said I still go to uwharrie more to work than to actually wheel these days.
I'll echo what others say when they talk about not quite knowing what we are doing and the lack of direction by the UFS.
I will however say that since Darin quit the Post service and has saturdays free there is much more good info coming our way than bad info.
I remember a work day Andrea and I went to that was in July and was only supposed to be a easy day due to the heat. I think trash pick up and putting about 20 feet of guard rail on our trail was the word we got.
Brian, Clint and Eric J showed up also and Eric brought his son most likely because it was supposed to be an easy day.
Well between Eric and I in our toyota truck we hauled no less than 8 bed fulls of rock that we had to load and unload by hand up the back side of RML in 90+ degrees.... not really what I brought Andrea out for. When the UFS guy finally showed up with the bob cat (3 hours late) he loaded one truck bed of rock for us and then disappeared again so we had to do the last 4 by hand again in the heat. Then when we thought we were done we were told that there was a large tree down at the top and we had to chop it up with a chain saw...... large was an understatement. I think I was there for about 10 hours that day and not too happy about it but we got it done.
Since you've been involved Darin its been a lot better but still there is lots of confusion on the UFS as to what to do .
The 2 work days i've been to this year kinda showed that.
In January the UFS was 2 hours late and we all stood around in a ice covered parking lot waiting on them.
The big March one was from what I had gleamed from the posts supposed to be about us making a camp site at the beginning of our trail but it was another trail to do..... instead we drained some water holes and then stood around while a UFS guy chopped some trees and then waited to take some posts down with the 40 other people there. Lots of standing around in between though.
Then Brian, Brett and I were told to go back to Hunt camp to help you load some boulders. I'm sure you remember those as you had trouble moving them with your John Deere so there was nothing we could really do but stand around and watch..... again.
I think it's little things like that that just take chip away at the willingness of some people.
That said I have been to some very good work days though and those are mostly the ones where we do what we need to do on our trails and then call it good and are left to our own devices.
Not trying to knock the UFS so much as I know most of the confusion comes from above and they are stretched to the limit man power wise. Just my observations.
I'll try to make at least one more before I go but I can't promise anything right now.
