What We've Learned This Winter

When we accepted our job for the winter, we had never worked for a resort style RV Park. We had only stayed in them as guests and enjoyed the amenities in between our jobs with State Parks or Federal Wildlife areas.  Last fall as we dipped our toe into this style job, I was a little apprehensive about being disconnected from the wilderness and we had no idea what the work camping experience would feel like in a park like this.

Now that we are nearing the end of our five-month commitment, it is safe to say we are pretty much sold on working for this type of park in the winter months. Llano Grande has been especially kind to my call to nature hard wiring. I can walk the levee, about 100 yards from our RV, and in less than ¼ mile I find myself in the middle of Estero Llano Grande State Park where the wildlife and birds are so dense it’s hard to remember the park is surrounded by the bustling Rio Grand Valley full of RV parks,  chain retail stores and restaurants, souvenir shops, Progresso, Mexico and Winter Texans.

Working for this resort is very business-like, in the sense that we have a written contract, duties and departments are well defined and the expectations are quite clear. We each work 12 ½ hours per week. Monday and Tuesday’s are our days. Me in the office, Champ with Maintenance. After that we are free to take in all the live music entertainment, card games, clubs for virtually every hobby and interest as we can stand.

Juarez St Site-

The Levee that protects the park from the Resaca

Wildlife area type parks are less formal. The work is not as defined, and the hours are more fluid. We show up on our days and do whatever the Rangers ask of us. There are loose job descriptions but as I have written over the past three years, “other duties as assigned’ is a very popular bullet point. We enjoy the variety and I relish working outdoors or in a Visitor’s Center interpreting the park to visitors. During our first winter, at a Wildlife Refuge, I was weeding out a flower bed in front of the offices.  The Head Ranger’s voice startled me when he spoke the words “You are really in your element aren’t you?” I was so engrossed in the flower bed and so happy doing the work I lost sight of my immediate surroundings and was completely unaware that he had been standing there for nearly a minute before he said anything. That pretty much sums up my love of working in natural areas.

However, there is something to be said for having a heated pool and hot tub available at the end of a busy day. I love having a Yoga class to take free of charge on Monday and Wednesdays before dinner. Then there are the Friday afternoon Happy Hours.  2 hours of live music, dancing and whatever we take in our coolers to drink or maybe a snack to share. For $10.00 each we went to a dance with a great oldies band one Saturday night. There are more activities than there are hours for the taking. All without leaving the park.

Hot tub and heated pool await each evening

There are pros and cons to both brands of work camping. We love working for the Corps of Engineers in Iowa during the summer months. We are both very attached to Saylorville Lake and hope to return there many more years. What we learned about ourselves this winter is we would rather work at the resorts in the winter.

Like many work campers, we are learning through experience what we like and don’t like. What questions to ask and how to find the perfect job for us as a couple. One very important thing I have learned about myself is that I need a park that has natural areas nearby, preferably walking distance. I all but suffocated in the concrete jungle of Ocala, Florida last winter. Even though we had breathtaking State Parks nearby and wonderful park neighbors who became friends, I really struggled with not being able to walk out the door and engage with the natural world. Llano, fits that need well. 

We still want to work in the Southwest but are no longer seeking a job with AZ State Parks or FWS for the winter months.  Deep down, I don’t think I will like being in a place where the sites are crushed rock instead of grass. On the other hand, I hear there are no mosquitoes in AZ. We won’t know until we try it for a winter. Even though we have spent 3 of 4 winters in Texas we aren’t quite ready to adopt the brand Winter Texan. 

Through our conversations with others who have worked for private parks, in both paid and site trade scenarios we have gathered a great deal of food for thought. For now, my sites are on April when we will   return to our ‘nest’ in good old site #7 at Saylorville Lake’s Volunteer Village. 

We aren’t yet ready to settle into a ‘rut’ of going to the same parks winter and spring.  We have a lot of places in the south that we want to still work camp during the winter months. What has changed is the focus on what kind of job we will seek out. Many people we run into who have spent many years in the same park have shared that they wished they had tried different places early on instead of falling into the routine of summer/winter in the same park. We will heed that advice as we have other sage advice from those who have gone before us. For now we will do one more year here before we start sampling other southern destinations once again.   Maybe someday we will settle into a park permanently, but neither of us sees that happening any year soon.

Until Next Time…

Sunday mornings

For years Sunday mornings have included watching CBS Sunday Morning. The trumpets of their intro music are a natural a sound to me as church bells on a Sunday morning. The stories are always interesting to me and I love Mo Rocca's Mobituary segment at the end of the show.  I'm trying hard to take a weekend and do nothing but it isn't something that I'm very good at.
As I watched the show this morning the sun started to peak through the cloud cover and I grew restless. It was 8:45 and already 70 degrees the sun was peaking out and I knew it would be a decent birding  morning. For the first time since ditching Direct TV I missed it since I couldn't record the rest of the show.
Never-the-less I grabbed my new camera and binnoculars and headed for the levee, hoping to see the Altamira Oriole again and photograph it. . We get Baltimore and Orchard Orioles in Iowa in abundance. This is a bird I will only see here or in Mexico so its a good sighting for this fledgling birder. I heard the familiar Oriole calls and soon found one eating seeds in a Mesquite Tree. Orioles are one of my favorites, not only for their coloring but their beautiful song.

Altamira Oriole 

The sun was short lived and the light became less that ideal for photography but I did get a decent picture of the Oriole I went in search of and was able to watch him in my binnoculars for a good while.
As I approached the entrance to the trail leading into the State Park, be still my heart, there stood two Bobcats in the middle of the trail!  One went into the tall grass but one stayed on the trail. I slowing took my camera off my shoulder and got three nice shots of him before he ambled off into the timber. It was one of those moments that made my heart skip a beat and I felt so lucky to have been in just the right place at precicely the right time. He showed very little concern with my presense and didn't dart away like I expected he would.

I walked back to the RV full of joy from the encounter. It's going to be a good day. I can catch Mo Rocca on his Podcast later today.

Until Next Time...

New Camera and New Birds

One of the cool things about coming to South Texas is the wildlife. There are birds and other critters here that I don’t see anywhere else. That was part of the draw. I knew South Texas would be different from Hill Country and the Coastal Bend areas we have volunteered in past years. One of the big benefits is there are no Juniper Trees, a source of misery for me our first winter in Texas. The birds are exotic as are the Winter Texans, who are a whole different breed from the Winter Texans who migrate to central parts of Texas. The constant in our Texas experience are the people. We really like native Texans. The Rio Grande Valley has become a sort of melting pot of people we have met on the road. We are getting a chance to spend time with people we met previous winters, including people we met in Florida last winter who are here this winter. We will see Iowa relatives who are spending their first winter in Texas this year and of course we have spent lots of time with our good friends Will and Judy, who we work with at Saylorville in the summer time and are the reason we came to the RGV this winter.

I have had wonderful birding experiences here on my weekend morning walks along the levee and into the State Park that abuts the RV park. Last weekend was a big birding weekend for me in general. I saw my first Altamira Oriole and Tropical Kingbird as I walked along the levee last Saturday morning. I was lazy that morning and took my binoculars but didn’t feel like hauling my camera along. Figures, I’d see two new birds in perfect light and not have a camera to capture the moment.

Later that afternoon, we wandered in to McAllen on an entirely different mission and ended up at Best Buy where I bought a new camera. I’ve been and SLR snob for years. I have been whining about not having quite enough lens for some of the wildlife shots I take. The problem lies in that, when I go lens shopping, I am too cheap to pay the big bucks for the lens I want and don’t want to haul the weight around. At an average of 8lbs, about 14” long and around  $2k, it’s easy to be indicisive. For some reason a Canon point and shoot caught my eye that afternoon. I picked it up aimed it at a box on a top shelf in the far corner of the store and was able to read the label. It had my attention. I started looking closer at it and found it had 4k resolution and was WiFi enabled. I was totally in awe of the advancement of digital technology. Still, I was having trouble with the fact that it was a simple point and shoot. It was on sale for $500.00 and I had a big birding day planned for the next day. Champ was all for me buying it. It weighed all of 2 lbs. I decided I would test drive in the next morning and if I didn’t like it, I’d bring it back on Monday.

We set out early Sunday morning on John’s bird tour.  When I pulled it out to take a picture of a Crested Cara Cara sitting several hundred yards in the outfield, I was a little embarrassed as the serious photographers pulled out their 10-pound monsters. That faded quickly as I shot a decent picture ( despite the crappy light)  of the bird and had lens to spare!

Crested Cara Cara

 By the end of the day I was in love with my new camera and didn’t once complain that I wish I had a little more lens. I actually pulled it back several times. I saw and photographed several species that were new for me. Most I will not see anywhere else but South Texas. One, the Savanah Sparrow is a cute little bird that can see at Saylorville now that I know when and what to look for.

Greater Yellowlegs

Reddish Egret

Roseated Spoonbill

Savanah Sparrows

White Tailed Kite

Loggerhead Shrike

Loggerhead prey impaled and awaiting dinner time 

As my home state freezes 5 feet deep into the soil and air temperature struggles to get above freezing, I sit on my patio in my shorts and flip flops and watch beautiful birds in the trees around us. My favorite the Great Kiskadee and the Vermillion Fly Catchers call from the live oaks. A Kestral sits on the top of the dead Palm across the road every night. Harris’s Hawks sit on the wires and one never knows what one will see on a walk across the levee and into the State Park next door. My new compact camera will be on my hip every time. Good things do indeed come in small packages.  

Until next time…

Painting Numbers On Sites

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…

New Year - New Decade

I was driving in the car yesterday and Spectrum radio was playing a top 28 of the 2010’s. That’s when it hit me that we were not only entering a new year but a new decade. Damn, I’m getting old. A whole decade whirled by and I barely noticed. I have a vivid memory of my friends and I standing on the playground in grade school, discussing how old we would be in the year 2000. That milestone was 20 years ago! Several years ago my Dad told me that at a point in my life, time would not just be going by fast but I would actually feel the sensation of acceleration of time passing. I think it’s safe to say I’ve reached that point.

It started me thinking about where Champ and I were in our journey in 2010. We had been married for 8 years; I was entering the severe burn-out stage of my career but wasn’t aware of it yet. It was the year our youngest got married. We were also in the fantasy stage of the life we are living now. We had held some of those late-night campfire meetings about how cool it would be to sell everything and be the volunteers we met in the campgrounds we frequented. Since 2010, we sold our acreage and moved into town thinking we would never be full time. We’ve had 4 grandkids born since then and somewhere along the line, I retired early we sold the place in town and are now entering our fourth year as full time RV volunteers.

Thinking about the past year, is about like any other year. There were some good things that happened and some not so good things. In the past 12 months we have met people who are now in our regular communication circle as a result of our travels and seen some new places. I am excited for the next year and the next decade. As I look ahead another decade to the beginning of 2030,  I marvel that our youngest child’s oldest son will be 18 years old. Our oldest grandson will be nearly 40 and the youngest of the grandkids will be in high school.  In 10 years, I will be applying for Medicare and Champ will be 78, yikes! Hopefully, we will still be working and travelling around the country.   In 10 years, I imagine we will be among the old timers at Saylorville Lake in the summers having 14 years under our belts as work campers there, by then. I’d like to believe our rig will be paid off, but trades seem to make that a life sentence that we choose.

In my mind, I have been developing a sort of decade bucket list for the 2020’s. I want to tour the Pacific Northwest and work camp at Glacier National Park. Given our strong desire to be in Iowa through the summer months, that will require a good deal of sacrifice at some point. I want to spend a winter in the Florida Keys. That is on the schedule in 2 years at a NWR we are scheduled to volunteer at in ‘21/’22. I would love to venture down the Baja Peninsula some winter and work in Alaska one summer. I dream all these things assuming of course the Champ and I will be eternally the age we are now. But if you don’t believe that what would one accomplish?  I look ahead with the best of hope that we will both stay healthy and active till we are a ripe old age and someday come off the road together by our own choice when we have done all we want to do. I can’t begin to wrap my head around how many more people we will know ten years from now when I am looking forward to the dawn of the 2030’s.

In the meantime, we don’t know what the next decade holds, or tomorrow for that matter. Who will we know, who will we have lost? Will be both still be alive?  What places will we see that we never dreamt of? What kind of cool jobs will we get to do? Life is full of unknowns. That is what makes it so much fun. Scenery changes, people come in and out of our lives and the wheels on the bus go round and round.

Until next time…

Another Snowbird Christmas

We are starting to get the hang of the whole snowbird Christmas routine. It will never be easy, but we get through it and have some fun along the way. This year was decidedly more social than ever before. Sitting here stuffed and exhausted on Christmas night I realize it ended up being a three-day event, with a little burp on Tuesday morning when we both worked for the park till Noon.

We have seen golf cart parades in other parks, but here at Llano Grande, they took it to a new level. They were more like floats than golf carts. We had never seen anything like it. The party started at the Events Center where over twenty decorated carts lined up and people could walk around voting. Some participants were vying for votes in the form of shots as we walked around and checked them out. After an hour-long parade through the park they gathered again at the Rec Hall at our end of the park and continued the party and awarded prizes from the voting. We congregated at our friends down on the corner to watch the parade go by and got so busy visiting with other volunteers we had just met that evening we missed the award ceremony. Realizing we had reveled through dinner time we broke up around 9 pm grabbed a quick late bite to eat and headed to bed so we could get up and report to work at 7 am the next morning.

Parade Winners

Runner Up

After our busy Christmas Eve morning with the park, we continued the festivities with Will and Judy at the home we were invited to on Thanksgiving. This time Paul and Cindy joined us, and we basked in the warm afternoon at the home of Kelly and Linda and much of their family. We marvel at the warm, welcoming way of Texans. Complete strangers will invite us into their homes as tagalongs from a mutual friend and make us feel like we’ve known them for years. It has happened that way all three winters we have been in Texas. The people here are most definitely the main draw for us to return to Texas.  After spending the afternoon at Kelly and Linda’s we headed back home to exchange gifts ourselves.

Kelly and Linda's place. Our wonderful hosts are at my left in the photo

Not a bad setting for a Christmas gathering. 

Somewhere along the way on Monday night we organized a Christmas morning communal breakfast with work camping friends here.  John and Cathy had plans to come over from Laguna Atascosa and spend Christmas with us as well. We awoke on Christmas morning to 60 degrees and brilliant sunshine. Hosting the breakfast was a welcome distraction to help us work through the yearly Christmas morning funk that we both find ourselves in. Face time with the kids and grandkids, lots of texting pictures back and forth is a double-edged sword. It makes us happy to see them and talk to them but depresses us at the same time. 10 of us enjoyed a huge potluck style feast, talked about our video chats with grandkids that morning, the angst about being away during the holidays and took calls and texts from family and friends. We disbanded around Noon. But it didn’t end there…

Christmas Brunch with friends 

Last year in Florida, our friends from Maine helped me connect with their neighbors and long-time friends, who are avid birders and spend their winters in Texas. They arrived last week and called me. I told them about our plans to check out the Butterfly Center near them and invited them to join us.  a Today we met them and spent a couple of hours getting to know each other as we shared our favorite hobby. I was in heaven with John, Cathy, and Judy and Marlin all very experienced birders on my flanks to explore the area. The wildlife viewing was mediocre, but the company was awesome. I saw a few butterflies that were new to me, and plan to return in March when the flowers are peaking, and the butterflies will be much more plentiful. It was a nice introduction both the Judy and Marlin as well as that area of Texas for birding and butterflying.

Me with my new friend Judith

John and Champ goofing around

Laviana White Skipper

Zebra Heliconian

This was our first snowbird Christmas that didn’t involve a park potluck. As far as Christmases go it was a very memorable one for us. No matter what we do in future years, something tells me, Christmas 2019 will be a memorable one.

Merry Christmas from Champ and Britt

Until Next Time….

Enjoy The Cold While It Lasts

“Enjoy the cold while it lasts”.  Those were the parting words of the weather reporter on the local news tonight. Highs in the Rio Grande Valley have been swinging between the lower 90’s and lower 70 ‘s. The cool temps last about 36 hours.

I’ve been lax about taking pictures, so far, this year. It’s not that we have been sitting idle, I have just lost my lust for the camera lens temporarily if you can believe that. We celebrated our good friend, Will’s 80^th birthday, attended the Christmas Party for the pharmacy I’m working for and the Resort’s Work Camper Christmas Party this past weekend. For most of the week, I’ve been pouting about our commitment here preventing me from being on the trip to Europe with my Aunt and five of my cousins. It is a trip I’ve been trying to do for years and this was the year to do it. But the work camping gig would not allow me the time off. I thought I had accepted the reality till my Google Calendar went off on Sunday evening reminding me I had a flight to catch the next morning. ( I forgot the travel agent synced  the itinerary when I initially booked the trip)  I have spent the week reminding myself of all the good things that this winter has placed in our path. I wondered to myself what would have happened if I had not been upfront and called them to get their blessing for the time off and just dropped it on them when I arrived this fall. Others in the park have done just that and gotten away with it. I don’t think the park is thrilled with the situation, but they didn’t kick them out either. I know I have missed a trip of a lifetime with extended family in a place I have longed to see for most of my life, but things happen for a reason. So, the week went on and I sit here this evening recalling the alternative experiences I have had in place of the trip down the Danube.

Friday evening, as Judy and I walked to the truck, just ahead of Will and Champ as we left a great Italian restaurant where we celebrated Will’s Octogenarian rite of passage’ we talked about the enduring features of a southern Christmas Season that northerners never really fully process. Like the sound of crickets and frogs while you look at Christmas lights and seeing garden tractors and grills on the sidewalk at Lowe’s instead of snowblowers.

I have a hard time processing the fact that we have only been gone from Iowa for 8 weeks. Nine, days after we put the jacks down in Texas I started my bookkeeping adventure for a local pharmacy. I talk often about this life presenting opportunities to do things we never thought we would do. Keeping the books for a pharmacy is definitely in that category. I have had one of the most professionally challenging experiences of my career in this, my semi-retirement. I took the job coming into a small well-established operation that lost its bookkeeper of 13 years and had been basically running on auto pilot for 4 months before I came into the picture. I was hired to be a fixer. My departure in late March was out on the table from the beginning and the plan is for me to clean things up, get the train back on the rails and groom an existing employee ( with no bookkeeping experience) to step up and take over when I leave.  They hired me to come in and take over. There is no training in a deal like this.  I have no experience in the pharmacy business, but know accounting processes. You go in, figure it out and apply your knowledge and experience. I’m more like a contractor than a part time employee. It’s a fascinating and eye-opening experience to see the inner workings of an industry that I generally shun. I go out of my way to avoid the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to putting things in my body. The people who own it are wonderful, down to earth people. Getting to know them is the real gem in the center of this experience. Yes, I’ll make some money and pay some bills, but the big take away will be meeting Ruben and Rosemary. They treated their staff to dinner out, some fun games, prizes and Secret Santa gift exchange Saturday evening. It was a long way from the stuffy bank Christmas Parties of my past.

At the park I am gaining experience in the reservation office and will leave with a working knowledge of the Campground and Resident Manager software used by most parks across the country. The park management hosted a fun meal and party for the nearly 100 work campers here at the resort. The event filled our Sunday evening to rounded out a weekend of holiday and birthday revelry.

Christmas is a week away. The pictures of grandkids visiting Santa are filling my inbox. We still look at long driveways and for a moment think what a pain it must be to plow them, before we remember there is no snow here.  We are planning to spend Christmas Day with good friends we met on our first volunteer gig in 2016. Others we met on the road over the years are arriving in South Texas and plans to see them are being put on the calendar. We will keep ourselves busy and try not to wallow in the sadness of not being with family.  As I talk to other snowbirds, I am reminded none of us ever get over the depressing feeling of not being with the kids for Christmas. We are thankful for technology like video phone calls and Amazon Prime.

As we search for a sweatshirt to put on for these cool days, we are reminded by the locals that this cool weather is welcome by them and they will indeed ‘enjoy the cold while it lasts’.

Until Next Time…