Instead of beautiful vistas and folks participating in fun activities at Virginia’s state park, today I will be sharing pictures of something much more mundane but in some ways way more important – bathhouses.
Since Virginia State Parks are approaching our 75th birthday in a couple of years, we have some historic structures.We have facilities built in the 30s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. We built a lot of beautiful cinder block buildings in the 50s (that we have been covering up with new exteriors ever since). Sadly some of these old structures are bathhouses in our campgrounds. Don’t get me wrong, we have remodeled them but no one is going to say they are new. And sometimes even when you clean an old bathhouse as much as you can, it still might not look that clean.
Where it has been possible to get the funds, we have been replacing some of our older bathhouses, especially the ones in worst repair. And where we have been fortunate to get new campgrounds constructed, of course those bath houses are brand new.
We took our nearly 75 years experience in operating campgrounds to design the ultimate in family friendly bath houses. One of the challenges was always what do you do with your young children when they are not the same sex. Even with children old enough to shower by themselves, parents have the concern over what might happen to them alone in the bath house. Iknow my local YMCA created family locker rooms to address these concerns as well as the corollary of having customers not comfortable with young children of the opposite sex in the shower room.
Our new bathhouses are designed to have family friendly individual shower and changing areas separate from the rest rooms. These have been extremely popular with our Virginia State Parks camping customers.
Hopefully we will be able to have the money to continue to replace some of our older bathhouse facilities. For what one of these bathhouses cost, three families could buy fairly nice homes, so it will take a lot of capital funding to make it happen.