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 easy-going 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 first-hand narrative describes one couple's journey from wide-eyed occasional campers to full-time owners of a medium-sized RV camp­ground 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.