When we accepted the job at a private RV Park we knew it
would be a different experience from working at a Federal or State Park. We’ve
been here two months now and have found we like it quite a lot. We love the amenities
and since we are both working for the site we only work a day and a half each per week, leaving ample time to take advantage of them.
As we get to know our fellow workcampers, we have found that
most of them are experienced working for private parks. Only one other couple
has worked for a federal recreation area and that happens to be our work companions from Saylorville Lake who happened
by pure coincidence to end up, not only at the same park as us this year, but
just a few sites away.
The main take away from our conversations has been to absolutely
insist on a detailed written job description along with a photograph of your
site. Many use Google Earth to get a current picture. Case in point, the
Maintenance Department that Champ and Paul are working with has undergone a lot
of turnover with work campers this season. When Paul got hired here, they told
him his main job for the winter would be painting new numbers on the over
1200 sites here. Sounds like a pretty nice gig! When he and Champ met with the
maintenance supervisor the first day, he told them it wasn’t a priority and
that their primary job was to keep the park looking nice. Most days that means,
curbside garbage collection. Other days there are light maintenance jobs, power
washing, picking up the pieces of palm bark and fronds, otherwise known as “Palm
Poop”. You get the picture. A couple days a month Champ spends the day in the
street sweeper. His very first job as a teenager was working a garbage route. He jokes now that after a long career as a crane operator, then 26
years at the Department of Transportation, he has come full circle back to
collecting trash. He even got to ride on the back of the compactor truck the
other day. So far, they have been tasked with repainting the number on exactly
one site. Only because the resident complained they weren’t getting
their Amazon deliveries because the site number was worn off.
Early on, one of the maintenance workers left because he hated the
work. The new guy Jim, showed up and announced, he had been hired to
paint numbers on all the sites. We tried not to snicker and smiled to ourselves
the next week when he joined Paul on trash duty. He transferred to the I.T.
department when they lost a tech a couple of weeks ago and John showed up in
the park to join the maintenance team. You guessed it, he told us he had been
hired to paint numbers on the sites! We didn’t even try to stifle the chuckles
that time. Apparently, the volunteer coordinator and the head of maintenance
are not on the same page in terms of what it means to work in maintenance. The
standing joke here is that painting numbers on sites must be code for picking up
garbage. The moral of the story is, get it in writing. I’m sure the park's job description,
if they even have one, has more bullet points than painting site numbers.
All that aside, we are having a pretty good experience. The
weather is awesome. We like the area and are taking part in many of the activities
and taking advantage of the pool and hot tub. I'm getting plenty of opportunity to go birding and have seen a number of species for the first time. Many of which I will not see anywhere but in the Rio Grande Valley. We are meeting many new people and
have formed a group of friends here in the park, some workcampers, some not. We’ll
pursue other private park jobs in future winters and put into practice some of
the job seeking and negotiating tactics that other, more experienced private
park volunteers use to be sure that their experience is a positive one. The
federal park jobs always have very detailed job descriptions and some have what
is called a ‘Volunteer Bill of Rights’ that detail expectations and
responsibilities of both the work campers and the park rangers who supervise
them. Private parks don’t do as good a job with that part. We have learned from
others that Google will often yield some sources of reviews of past
workcampers
at various places. Reviews should always be taken with a grain of salt of
course but if there is a pattern of bad experience, it will likely show up in repetitive
negative feedback. After all, review writers are more often motivated by bad experiences, than good.
In the meantime, I’ll be working in the office and the guys
will be ‘painting numbers on sites’. In between we’ll lounge around the pool,
on someone’s patio or at a card table somewhere in the park, while we watch the
blizzards and freezing temperatures up north in our new feeds a safe distance
1500 miles south of home.
Until next time…
