Day 181 / 184

Saylorville Lake 93 with Tropical Humidity

As I write this evening, the cold front has arrived. Cool, dry air is slamming into the dome of hot, moist tropical air that has dominated Iowa the past week. The weather station ticker detailing storm warnings has been ever present all day. In the hour since arriving home from work the temperature has dropped over 15 degrees. The windows are open and the fresh air is blowing through the motorhome.

Flood waters have receded for the most part. Saylorville Lake will officially conclude a summer season without the beaches officially opening. The spring flooding had almost subsided and the divers were schedule to come and inspect the lake bottom in the swimming areas when the torrential rains of late June inundated Iowa and resulted in flooding, the likes of which had not been seen here in nearly 10 years. Now, in August, shore line is exposed once again but the beaches will not open by official definition. It is quite something to walk down to the boat ramp and look at the water line on the light poles 15 feet in the air where the parking lot was lake bottom 30 days ago.

[caption id="attachment_1102" align="alignleft" width="200"] Red Bar is theWater Crest line at boat launch parking lot.[/caption]

Since then, Champ, along with the Natural Resources Team and the Maintenance Dept. at the lake have worked hard to bring facilities back to    pre-flood condition. The is damage caused by the awesome power of water moving when and where it wants. A sink hole under part of the bike trail developed and one of the parking lots is still settling after several weeks of water moving over and under it.  They are subtle things that go unnoticed by the visitor’s eye. Our maintenance team received a national service award for their hard, around the clock work to install pumps at the barrier dam that protects Polk City from flooding. I knew they were all busy that holiday weekend but didn’t realize how much they really did till I read the citation letter that came from the District Commander. Hat’s off to all of them for their dedication.

Three years ago, we were simply visitors, camping at Prairie Flower and launching the boat from Cherry Glen. We were blissfully ignorant to all that goes on behind the scenes when the water comes up.  We didn’t know beaches had to be inspected by divers before buoys and swimming area markers were placed. We certainly didn’t know the difference between beach and shoreline. If there was sand it was a beach! We didn't even care much about designated swimming areas. We swam off the boat where we dropped anchor or put on the shore line with out much thought to what was below us. Now we know better. The dangers that exist swimming on shoreline are sobering now that we understand them and realize how much we didn’t know before.

[caption id="attachment_1103" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Sandpiper Beach with flood debris[/caption]

We had our late summer Volunteer Meeting last week where everyone talks about their departure date, and whether they want to return to the same job next year. This is the time where you make your wishes known if you want a change of scenery in your volunteer duties here. Champ expressed interest in a new job. We’ll find out soon if they decide to place him in it. I will write the newsletters again next year and work with Natural Resourses when I can depending on how much I work in town, to pay for my health coverage. That will not be known till November when I do my renewal. The meeting was a reminder of how quickly our time in Iowa is coming to an end. Summers go fast for everyone. You blink and the great grandchild you held in your arms in the hospital last week is starting 4^th grade! Summers in Iowa go something like this. School lets out in May.  Independence Day comes and goes. The State Fair has it’s 10 day run. School Starts. Blizzards Come. Somewhere between school starting and blizzards we get out of dodge. I can’t believe we are looking forward to our third winter away from the freezer that is Iowa in the winter. I struggle with the thought of leaving the kids for 5 months. It wouldn’t matter if I saw them every day, I wouldn’t feel like I spent enough time with them. Especially the boys, who both live far enough from Des Moines, we can’t just drop in on them on a whim or vice-versa.

We still have lots of plans before we leave. My brother-in-law’s retirement party. Our wedding anniversary and couple more birthdays and our much anticipated trip to the Dominican Republic in October with the group we used to camp with regularly. It will go by in a flash and before we know what happened we will be knee deep in rural Georgia, Interpreting Jimmy Carter’s boyhood farm and home town to those who visit.  Click on the link to check it out!  We're are pretty excited to spend three months there this coming winter.  https://www.nps.gov/jica/index.htm

It makes me dizzy thinking about it. For now, it's on with the week at hand.

Until next time...

 

Day 175 / 190 Passing The Baton

Saylorville Lake

We went to the wedding of my good friend’s oldest son this past weekend. This was the second wedding of a friend’s child this summer and a beautiful event.  These things make you realize you are moving up the ladder of elderhood. As if being a grandparent isn’t enough to make one feel old, watching all your friend’s kids grow up along with yours makes you realize you are quickly being swept up the generational ladder. All of a sudden, you realize there are more people behind you than ahead of you in the aging game.  The father of the bride used the analogy “passing the baton’ in reference to conceding his place as number one man in his daughter’s life to his new son-in-law. It made me start thinking about the hierarchy of seasoned and new RV volunteers.

As we spend time with our friends here at volunteer village who have been work camping for over 15 years we wonder what it will be like when they have traded their gypsy life for a stationary one once again. Volunteer Village at Saylorville will be strange without Will and Judy or Don but it is inevitable that one of these years we will return, and they will not. The culture of work camping is much like a family. Older more experienced workcampers mentor the newer workcampers and we learn from them. Tenured couples have a huge catalog of stories and the newbies dream of the time when they are the ones who are sitting around the campfire telling tales to the up and coming generation of workcampers.

In our first two years we have become friends with several couples who have been doing this for many years. In the modern world of full time park volunteers these people are perhaps the first or second generation. I imagine the original work campers were the circus people, or carnies. Before that, we knew them as the traveling show or medicine men selling magic elixir (aka, opium) back then they called them gypsies.  As camping has become more popular, campgrounds have grown and budgets to fund county, state and federal parks has shrunk. Enter the RV Volunteer. People like Champ and I who love the camping lifestyle as much as we love being in a nice campground fill in the gap of paid employees and the work it takes to make the campgrounds nice for the people who visit them. The subculture of park volunteers is a distinct sect of the work camping world. We don’t get paid except for our site and utilities. That’s fine with us.  We love what we do, and we love who we do it with. Our fellow volunteers become our family on the road and a certain respect is bestowed upon those who have been committed for years. It’s a little like a tribal hierarchy of respect. We aspire to be them and hope for the good luck and good health that it takes to look back on 20 years in the game.

Like parents or older siblings, we look up to the Will and Judy’s of the work camping world. We love them and dread the year when we are here, and they are not. Every job we go to we get to know the other volunteers, some newer at it than us and some like our friends here who are veterans. We share and learn from each other and make connections. Like parents watching their kids grow up, volunteers watch the years tick by just as fast and realize we will quickly become the old timers of the volunteer village.

It is truly the beginning of a new life cycle, when you embark on this wonderful journey. Who knows what park volunteers will look like in 15 years, when Champ and I are the old timers sitting around the campfire, telling tales of being flooded out of our site in 2018, going an entire summer with an ailing AC unit or having emergency surgery 1500 miles from everyone we know. In a decade we’ll have so many stories we won’t be able to remember them all and probably bicker about what year it was or where we were when this or that happened. I can’t wait. Just like being a grandparent, being the 15+ year RV veterans will be a lot like that I think.

As we look down the barrel of our third winter away, I shudder at how quickly time is moving. One of these years Will and Judy will ‘pass the baton’ to us, Someday, we will be ready to hand it off to people just like us and the wheels on the bus will go round and round.

I can’t leave without putting in some pictures from the wedding. It was such a special day for a family who lives deep in my heart.

[gallery ids="1099,1098,1097,1096,1095"]

Until Next time…

 

Day 168 / 197 Finding Ones Happy Place

Saylorville Lake Sunny 85 Degrees

One of the answers to the question that has been on my mind lately is about finding ones happy place. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s that physical space where you go when you need to decompress, get yourself centered after a busy day, or escape a stressful situation. It comes in many forms. For some it is a room in their house. Others it is church or maybe and AA meeting. For a vast majority of humans, it is a physical space outside. It’s no surprise that the outdoors tends to be a place of solace. After all, human kind has been around some 200,000 years. The industrial world with it’s synthetic, mechanical sounds and smells has only been around about 200 years, a mere one tenth of one percent of the time man has walked the earth. That’s some serious evolutionary influence.

We crave the organic sounds and smells of an outdoor space. That is why we buy candles that claim to smell like mountain air or sea breeze or dew kissed leaves. You don’t need a $12.00 candle for that, just go outside!

Back to my answer. When you move about the country volunteering for different parks you accumulate a library of those outdoor spaces that make you feel grounded and whole. It’s really cool when you stop and think about it. My connection to the outdoors started at a very young age. I grew up in a house dropped in the middle of 5 acres of dense White Oak timber with a ravine that surrounded ¾ quarters of the property. The other quarter was the dirt road. I had two sisters younger than me 5 and 7 years to be exact. As the oldest, 5 years removed from the other two, I existed it this weird no man’s land of birth order. I was who I was.  The other two were babies and constantly referred to as ‘the girls’ by my mother. I was a girl too, but in my parents mind I was separate from the other two. As a result, I felt very isolated from my immediate family and in the midst of my mom trying to cope with two high maintenance toddlers and my dad busy running the family business for grandpa I had a lot of time on my hands when I was young. I retreated to the woods on a regular basis to get away from the busyness of the household and try to figure out my place in the world. My favorite spot was a big boulder left behind by the glaciers, on the north side of our property right next to the creek. I would sit there and dig up cool glacial rocks, listen the water gurgling over the stones, the birds and squirrels fussing about and the occasional car barreling down our road.  When I was in the outdoors alone I knew who I was. Fast forward 40 some years, three careers, two kids and I find myself back in my place where I know who I am. Smack dab in the middle of the natural world.

[caption id="attachment_1092" align="alignleft" width="243"] My view as I write[/caption]

I have always had a love affair with Colorado and its wild, remote, unbridled ways. I fell completely in love with the Wildlife Refuge we worked for our first winter. Upon returning there for a week on our way to South Texas last winter I validate my love for the place. It wasn’t puppy love that first winter. Those 7 days last fall were special at Balcones. Here at Saylorville I sit on my patio and type after a hectic day at my part time job and feel the breeze move over me, the smells of the timber and lake. Listen to the Red Bellied Woodpecker call out from the tree behind my motorhome, crickets chirping and my tabby cat Buster whine because his lead can’t  reach me. All organic sounds that calm my soul and make me feel good. When you live in the campground you get that whenever you want it.

So, the answer? If you find your center in the outdoors and you travel around doing it, your ‘happy place’ is lots of places not just one place. The number of those places grows with your time on the road.  That’s the best part for this tree hugger.

Until next time…

 

Day 164 / 201 Fair Day

Saylorville Lake Sunshine 85 Degrees (perfect State Fair weather)

The Famous Iowa State Fair began on Thursday. Over a million people from all over the world will visit the huge fair over the next 10 days. Native Iowans have a mindset programmed in their DNA that makes them believe if they don’t go at least one day of the fair they will be doomed to an eternity in purgatory with other bad Iowans who weren’t fair goers. It’s an Iowa thing. I’ve been to state fairs in other states. This one truly is one of the best.

We are starting to realize that we have crossed the line from novice full timers to the ones that newer full-timers or what I call full-time dreamers seek out for insight into the life style. When we were starting to talk seriously with each other about actually doing this we started picking the brains of every full timer we came across. You learn to sniff them out. They (now we) have a certain subtle energy that is easily recognizable by certain other campers who want to be full time. It’s hard to explain. We are less the brain pickers now and more the pickees. I love it either way. I love talking to the warriors who have been at it nearly two decades, as much as I like talking to the dreamers who want to know how we find gigs, or how we brought ourselves to trade our foundation and roots for wheels.

Today we worked the Saylorville Lake booth at the State Fair and talked to all sorts of people. We talked to a couple who dream of doing what we do. One of my best friend’s sons stopped by and said hi, and best of all my old office mate and boss, who I still consider a friend even though we don’t see each other much, was at the fair and stopped by with her family. It made my heart so happy to see her! It has been nearly two years since we last saw each other and the first thing she said is, “you look so happy”. She meant it and she was right. It’s that energy thing I mentioned earlier. I don’t know what it is, but there is a certain look that people who are truly content with their lives and unburdened by the daily grind of the rat race have. It’s kind of like the energy of someone who is totally swept off their feet by a new love.

[gallery ids="1088,1087,1086"]

After we finished our shift we “Did the Fair” with Steve and Sue, Champ’s brother and sister in law who we are close to spent a lot of time with before we “sold everything and took off” (as Steve puts it). We had a great day! It was another of those times when you try to wring out as much quality time as you can, knowing we will be apart for the winter.

As we enter, full throttle into the last half of our summer season at home we are becoming so busy we don’t know what day it is. Late summer birthdays, The Fair, an extra volunteer gig that I picked up, a new baby born, that we have yet to see, what will likely be a weekend motorcycle trip to the Loess Hills this fall that just struck me today as a must do before we leave this fall and an out of town wedding next weekend, is making us both tired just thinking about it. In the meantime, we try to cram 12 months of family and kid time into the 5 ½ months we are in Iowa.  Plains Georgia will be a change of pace akin to getting off a Japanese Super Train and hopping into a covered wagon. We may need it by then to recover from the break-neck speed that life is travelling this summer. When I decided to start volunteering for the new Nature Center, Champ laughed at me and said, “You’re just like your Aunt Pat, you’ll be 100 years old and still have your finger in a dozen pies and love every minute of it”. He’s right I can’t get enough now that I have time. I ran across a Gandhi quote for the last newsletter I wrote that fits this wonderful life so well.

“The best way to find yourself, is to lose yourself in service to others”

Until Next Time…

Day 159 / 206

Saylorville Lake Cloudy 90 Degrees

I love an opportunity to share my passion for nature and especially in the capacity of being a part of something that introduces the natural world to those who do not experience it in their everyday lives. Watching someone learn about the wonders of the natural world really charges my batteries. That passion is something that I share with my mother. It is one of very few planes where we truly connect.

[caption id="attachment_1080" align="alignnone" width="300"] Jester Park Nature Center view from back[/caption]

Iowa has a really special new place where that very thing will happen. The Jester Park Nature Center held its grand opening yesterday. I was completely enchanted with the place. It has been talked about for over 10 years. Aggressive fund raising and the coming together of minds from all over the country has resulted in a state of the art, stunning center where people can come and learn, get their hands dirty, squish wetlands muck between their bare toes, learn to fish, shoot a gun or a bow. You name it, if it has anything to do with Iowa’s natural world you can learn about it here. The place is amazing and beautiful!

[caption id="attachment_1081" align="alignright" width="300"] Mom[/caption]

I called mom last week and asked if she wanted to go to the Open House with me. She used to volunteer at the Warren County Conservation Office when I was younger.  I believe those were some of the happiest years of her life. It made my own heart happy to watch her yesterday. I know she was reliving some of her happy times, when she volunteered herself. We had a great afternoon, two nature nerds getting off watching kids and adults alike experience things they normally don’t in their suit and tie, run the kids to endless activities daily lives. Everyone was happy there. Maybe it was the free ice cream, maybe it was just that they were outside and in a different environment. The energy was good.

That brings me to yet another answer to the infamous question. If you are a tree hugger, like me, and you get charged up going to events like this, you have the inside track to all these events. When you volunteer at one place you tend to be very in tune with other activities and volunteer opportunities at neighboring or partnering places that you would otherwise likely miss if you were just passing through as a visitor.  I signed up to volunteer a few hours for them the rest of the summer, just to be involved and learn more myself so I can share it with others. Jester is just across the lake from us. It’s one of the best places to watch shore birds and water fowl in the state. We took some volunteer friends there when they visited Iowa last year.

[caption id="attachment_1082" align="alignleft" width="300"] Franklins Gull Feeding[/caption]

Yesterday was a win-win. I spent some good time with mom and I got to see an Iowa State Parks dream come true.

Until next time…

Day 157 / 208 Snowbird Guilt

Saylorville Lake Sunshine 95 Degrees

Yesterday was pretty special for me. I woke up Friday morning with plans to pick up Hunter and Isaac (our daughter’s boys) and take them shopping for some things for the upcoming soccer season, Isaac’s first. I had no idea if he would even be willing to go. Last time we tried to pick them up he had a melt down and we only took Hunter. Isaac turns 4 next week and was two when we started leaving in the winter. He is hard to win over when we return in the spring. A risk we knew we were taking when we jumped off the full-time adventure cliff.  My grandma’s heart sung when I walked in the house and was greeted with smiles and excitement for the day ahead. He said bye to his dad and off we went, no negotiating, no hesitance. It was awesome. We had a great time shopping and going out for lunch, just me and the boys. We ended the afternoon, back at our site and Champ got some good time with them before Kelsy came to pick them up after work. It will be a yearly process with the little ones winning them over just in time to leave again. The worst of it is, that is only a couple of the kids. Our granddaughter Nora is 90 miles away, but she seems to always be happy to see us. It just takes more planning to see her.  We have two young great grandkids 45 minutes away who are quickly becoming strangers and that breaks our hearts. My rational mind says to me that’s normal for lots of grandparents, I just didn’t think it would be us. I also have to remind myself, that life is super busy these days. Kids are busy with their jobs, and day to day life. Even when we lived here year-round we didn’t see them as much as we wanted.  Life is about choices.  I think the reason it bothers me so much is that I grew up next door to my paternal grandmother and was close to her. I cherish that relationship. I realize now, I was very lucky to have had that. Most snow birds will tell you the worst part is leaving the kids, but alas, we live our retirement years the way we live them. All life choices come with consequences, we pick our poison and our nectar. April to October, we savor every moment with the little ones (and the big ones), they sure don’t stay little for very long, but on the other hand we won’t be young and healthy forever.

August will be an incredibly busy month. Birthday’s, an out of town wedding and a couple of shifts working the booth for the lake at the Iowa State Fair. August will fly by, September will go by in a blink and before we know what happened we’ll be preparing to leave for our third winter in the south. It makes my head spin some days.

Until next time…