I must say we have had fun putting this post together and reminiscing on all the places we have been! Truly an amazing adventure and we got to see family and friends along the way and even made some new friends for which we are ever grateful! We have traveled to 16 different states and put 9860 miles on the Solitude. Many people qualify a state they stayed in differently and for us that is staying at least one night in the state, not just driving through. We stayed at 50 different locations. That is almost 1 new location a week, however some were just a day while we were traveling to a new location and others were for over a month. Of those, we stayed at: -2 free workamping spots -2 family & friends moochdocking spots -1 Boondockers Welcome spot -2 Harvest Host spots -2 Fairgrounds -7 Passport America locations -2 County Parks -3 City Parks -3 Corp of Engineers Parks -11 State Parks -15 Private Parks Favorite Places We Have Stayed Of course our friends and family are tops on the list!!! Fort Wilderness at Disney is a no brainer, but at an avg night rate of $115, this was a special visit and not a normal occurrence! We stayed in the 1200 loop and really liked the location. It was half way between the lake and the bus stop to the parks. We rented a golf cart from an off-site vendor and had a great time zipping around the campground because it is sooo big! THe amenities were amazing, including the laundry rooms that had a site online you could see if there were machines free to use or how long your laundry had to go! Amazing idea! We stayed 11 nights, which was perfect to visit Disney and the greater Orlando area. We flew our boys down and enjoyed a memorable family vacation! Read about our Disney trip here. Another great, but expensive place was Anchor Down in Dandridge, TN, just north of Pigeon Forge and the Great Smoky Mountains. Beautiful views, great amenities and the sites with fireplaces...oh my!! Read about our time at Anchors Down here. In the reasonably priced private campground category, Belle Ridge Retreat in small town Monterey, TN was a winner. This is a relatively new campground that has some great amenities! Nestled in the woods on the Cumberland Plateau, this beautiful park has tons of trails for hiking and ATV's. You can rent an UTV and go exploring, including caves! The bath house and laundry room is also top notch! Read about our peaceful time here. Best up and coming park is Rest Up Camping & RV Corral in southern IL. When we visited in July 2018, they had just opened and we were one of the first campers. This will definitely be a contender for top park with FHU and lots of activities and a yummy saloon and grill! You can read about our time here. Best Corp of Engineer park had to be hands down Mill Creek COE park on Table Rock Lake in Branson. Our site out on the end of the Peninsula had water views on three sides with amazing sunsets. Great site to relax and enjoy time with friends. Read about our time at Mill Creek here. Best State Park is a tough category because we had a bunch of great parks that we love but Topsail Preserve State Park in Santa Rosa Beach, FL topped the list. How can you beat being that close to the gulf and have full hook ups! A true gem and we met up with friends and had a great time! Read about our time here. We really do need to mention Don Carter State Park in Gainesville, GA as a runner up! Most sites have lake views and with almost FHU (except for black tank), it really was a wonderful park. This is also close to where we used to live in GA so we had a great home base for visiting the old haunts and friends. Read about our time at this great park here. Our best public free spot has to be Mortimer Farms in AZ, part of the Harvest Host network. Rick made a lifelong friend with Pedro the donkey and we enjoyed the hospitality and delicious food they have to offer! We could mention soo many other parks that were close runners up. We really got lucky with some great places to stay this first year but had a couple of duds. Oh well, that is why the house has wheels, right?! For those interested in all the locations we stayed, you can check out our campground tab here. We will try to keep that up with every place we stayed and the details in hopes that it helps others find great sites too. Workamping Gigs We have been fortunate to find some pretty cool workamping gigs in our first year on the road. We have heard horror stories from other workampers and we are happy to say that we did not have any crazy stories to add! We really did enjoy all three of our gigs and, they were all different. -Peninsula State Park- We were camp hosts in one of the 5 campgrounds within the park for a month in July and August. We took care of Welker's campground and Welker's Point day use area. We had about 55 sites that we picked up in after campers left, checked trash and spot checked the restrooms. There was full time staff who cleaned the restrooms. You can read about our time here. -Lee Bottom Flying Field- Here we helped the really cool owners, Rich & Ginger, on some projects around the airfield such as powerwashing and painting picnic tables and a fuel wagon, replace a door and cleaned up a bath house, some landscaping and much more. We spent September and October down on the river bottom and had a great time exploring the area and hanging out watching the planes land right in front of our RV! You can read about our time here. -Val Vista Village- At Val Vista we worked for Cal-Am Food Services in the bar & grill. This was quite the experience, especially when Happy Hour rolled around every day. Rick rocked it in the kitchen and I ran food and drinks out to the tables and pool. You can read more about our experience here We have some really neat workamping gigs lined up for our second year. These workamping opportunities allow us to not only continue this lifestyle, but explore places for longer periods of time that we may not have gone to without the job. We really love all the different experiences and will continue to search out the next cool opportunity. Who knows...we might just be photographers in the near future...hint, hint. Top Places We Visited We also want to identify the top places we have visited and again, really hard to keep this to just a couple so we will post pictures from some of them. Again, we could go on and on because we have seen an unbelievable amount of amazing things! This year has allowed us to see more than we ever would have in our old sticks & bricks life. We are truly blessed and are excited to see what year 2 brings! Speaking of year 2, we are back in the Midwest for a couple more months and then we will be making our way down to TX for some camp hosting and some R&R on the beach for the winter. After that remains to be seen. Now that we have a year under our belts, I am trying to lay back a bit on the planning and see where the road takes us. SHOP AMAZON HERE
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As we are wrapping up our first couple weeks here, we have had our share of fun stuff we have had to address, met more folks and got out a bit more. Without going into gory details, our campground happenings included still cleaning up the aftermath of 4th of July fireworks including sparklers and poppers, even though there are signs everywhere stating fireworks are not allowed in the park. Do you know how hard those little pieces of paper are to pick up with a grabber??? Rick has settled into being the firepit cleaner and I walk the site to pick up trash with my little grabber and grab the tags on the post. Rick loves to drive the gator, so I let him enjoy that task. It is amazing what people throw into the firepit and we recently had a site with mounds of peanut shells all around the firepit. That took some time to clean up and then Rick likes to also rake around the firepit, sometimes making pretty patterns. I think he misses his pattern making when he mowed lawn at the house. We have had some other camper assist issues like loaning out a battery jumper for a dead car battery, keeping an eye out for a lost wedding band, helping a flustered camper who was turned around find her site and a late night missing child search that ended before it began. We even had a site of drunk, singing young men at 3am. Thankfully we were told about that the next morning and not at the time. They did quiet down when another camper mentioned to them that this was quiet time and others were trying to sleep. Knock on wood, we have not had anything worse than that. We also have grateful campers who go out of their way to tell us what a great job we are doing to keep the campground clean and even gourmet smores made for us by a family who Rick helped to repair a bike. We also continue to have plumbing issues throughout the campground. It seems the piping throughout the park is pretty old and is in need of updating which is on the horizon. We met the maintenance person in charge of plumbing that had come by to fix our plugged sinks that we reported when we arrived. Only 4 days, not bad. I was expecting a week or longer. Those issues have seemed to subside, knock on wood. We did hear today at a camp host meeting that there are several improvements coming to the park. Exciting stuff but obviously, they do not happen overnight. As for outings, we got dressed up Tuesday night, the 17th and headed out for my birthday dinner. I am a Beef Wellington fan from way back to my days of bussing tables when I was 15 and I would beg the chef to make me a tiny Wellington on Sat nights after a long night. That usually meant that I would have to devein some shrimp for him, but it was well worth it! We went to the English Inn not far outside the park and dinner was wonderful! We were both soo stuffed walking out and promised that we cannot eat like that again for some time!!! It was a splurge since it was a birthday dinner. We are trying to limit our dining out to cheaper breakfasts or lunches, or not at all! We are really trying to get within a budget that we developed from looking at many other full-timers. We will see how July shapes up and we will share that on this blog as I know there are other full time dreamers that would benefit from the information, just like we did. Plus it keeps us accountable! Our other evening out was to see one of the musicals here at the Northern Theatre in the park. I mentioned in the previous post that we received complimentary tickets for all 3 shows. The first show we went to was Dairy Heirs. A funny, heartwarming musical about life on a farm in WI and coming back home. It was a beautiful evening in an intimate setting and the cast was very talented! After the show we grabbed a pizza and salad at Wild Tomato, which is a Door County favorite, right outside the park. OK, I just realized we have not taken pictures of any of this awesome food. Wow, that is not like us! We will try to rectify that in future posts. We have also had some visitors. Rick’s Army buddy from Germany, who lives north of Green Bay, stopped over with his wife for a delicious dinner creation that Rick just whipped up off the cuff. We then topped if off with a yummy cherry pie, baked with fresh Door County cherries. The next day friends of ours from home stopped by to say HI and see our new home and where we were working. It was good to catch up! We also have some others stopping by in August and topping our time off here in Door County with a big family camp out. Looking forward to it! By far the majority of our camper interaction has been with folks who are curious about our camp host position, our RV and our new lifestyle. We spend quite a bit of time answering questions from other campers about what our plans are, where we are planning to go and how the heck we can do this soo young. Some really entertaining conversations. One of the things we have had to solution for is the dumping of the tanks on the RV. Unfortunately, the host sites only have electric, so we needed to figure out how we would refill the fresh tank and dump the gray and black tanks. For us to pack up the RV and take it down to the dump station would be quite the undertaking, and that would also mean we would have to repark it. NOT! We talked with other camp hosts and they gave us some suggestions on what they do. For filling the fresh water tank, we were able to stretch all of our hoses, 85 ft worth, to the bath house clean up sink. Good deal. Now the crappy part…LOL. To dump the tanks, we have a man hole/sewer cover over by the bath house and Rick would fill up our lucy lu dump dolly and roll it over there and then dump. We picked midday to do this as that is when most of the campers are out and about. The black tank and one gray tank went well but the last gray tank proved to be our first big RV issue. The gray tank gate valve pull, which is a cable, would not release. Rick tried spraying WD-40, pulled off the back access panel to make sure the cable wasn’t binding anywhere, which it wasn’t. He then checked the manuals for info, called and left a message for a contact at the manufacturer, Grand Design. He then went to the Grand Design facebook groups and posted the issue, wondering if others had the issue and how they solved it. One suggestion was to spray PB Blaster, a penetrating oil, on the valve assembly by the pull handle. Rick then let that soak with a ziploc bag over the top. A tech from the manufacturer then called back and confirmed that what he was doing is what a repair tech would do. After a couple hours Rick went back to it and tried to release, hit it with a hammer, which didn’t release and then took two wrenches and twisted and it finally came loose. He then cleaned it off thoroughly and lubed all three valves and after all of that, a lesson learned that lubing the cables will be on the monthly list of maintenance things to do. Amazing how rusty it had gotten after only two weeks! Overall this campground host position has been a wonderful first workamping experience. The campers have been very friendly, it is a quiet and peaceful campground and the weather has been beautiful! We could certainly get used to this! Enjoy some pictures of the park. SHOP AMAZON HERE
We participate in the Amazon affiliate program and we appreciate you using our Amazon link above to make your Amazon purchases. It does not cost you anything additional and helps us to support our blog. You can even save our link as a favorite and use that whenever you need to make an Amazon purchase. Thank you!!! We headed north Thursday to our first workamping experience. We left our moochdocking spot at my Dad's and headed 3 hours north to Peninsula State Park-Welckers campground. The journey was uneventful, except for a little rain, and we pulled in around 3pm. This state park is located in Door County, which swells with tourists in the summer from all over the world, but mostly from IL. LOL Fellow cheeseheads will get that reference! Peninsula State Park is one of the states largest and busiest state parks with over 3700 acres, with about ¾ undeveloped. It has really everything within the park. There are 5 different campgrounds, a full golf course and restaurant, a lighthouse to tour, a beach complete with store and all sorts of water rentals, lots of trails and a wonderful outdoor playhouse in the summer that has some great comedy musicals. When we arrived we checked in at the office and found that our contact had gone home sick. We met one of the rangers who gave us a bunch of keys, a Rubbermaid bin and manuals and said everything we need is in the bin and at the site, including the Gator that we are able to use for our duties. They were very nice to call one of the other seasoned hosts to come over to our site to answer any questions. I have to say, I was a bit nervous about being handed the materials and being let loose to figure it out. The questions were mounting as we drove to our site. Most of the park is wooded, as is our campground, Welcker's Point. I was nervous about getting down the roads with our tall, 42 ft 5th wheel, hoping we would not be scrapping too much on trees aside or above us. We did pretty good with just a brush of leaves here and there. Our site is quite wide and Rick was able to wiggle the 5th wheel in to fit lengthwise. Being the hosts, we do get a larger site and electric. Unfortunately, most WI state parks are set up the same way, with only electric. The good thing is, in talking to other hosts, we can get additional water from the water fountain in front of the bath house next to us and use our little wheely dump tank and dump in the man hole near the bathrooms. Not ideal, but we will make it work. Being next to the bath house helps in that we can use the showers and bathrooms there most of the time. Our campground consists of 81 non-electric sites in a large loop with another cutting through the middle and a small loop of 7 sites off to the side. We have 3 bath houses, one of which does not have showers. Dumpsters are at the entrance road to our campground. We also have responsibility for Welcker’s Point, the small day use area across the main road from our campground. What are our duties as camp hosts you ask??? Well that was sort of vague but we knew we had to check sites after campers left, making sure to empty trash and ash from the firepits and check sites for trash and take down the departure day tags. Ok cool, we got that. We do have a cleaning crew that comes through daily, in years past it used to be twice a day. They clean the bathrooms and stock them. We then check them periodically to make sure there is no issues and they have TP. After that it gets a bit fuzzy. In talking with a couple other hosts that have been here for years, it is very loosely managed. There is no micro-managing of campground hosts. We had another camp host come over and took us to show us where the maintenance shop is, supplies, where to gas up the gator, etc. You can imagine we had a ton of questions for him. He has been a campground host for over twenty years and was a wealth of knowledge. He introduced us to the lead maintenance man and gave us pointers as to how to write up maintenance tickets, etc. We also have responsibility for the day use area and our guess is that we check for trash there and empty the grills. We also set up a charging station at our site on the extra picnic table we have. That has become very popular and our campers, young and old appreciate the ability to charge phones, ipads and batteries. After that, we are just learning as we go as to what other “duties” are. SO far, we have checked some sites for the office when they called, helped campers with directions, posted the daily weather forecast on our information board, trimmed a branch for a camper concerned about it brushing his camper when he left and answering A LOT of questions about our RV and our full-time lifestyle. There has also been a change in who enforces and monitors the park. In years past it was the park rangers, this year it is the DNR wardens. We get the distinct feeling that some folks, including other hosts are still getting used to that idea and have not quite warmed up to it yet. We were given a flip phone with pre-programmed numbers for us to call, such as the office, multiple people’s names…not sure who they are or what they do and the rangers. Umm, no Wardens! So what happens if we need them??? We were fortunate to have the supervising warden on duty our second day and he was very nice and answered some questions for us and came back with a print out of the wardens schedules and all their phone numbers. I then promptly programmed them in to our phone. Scary thought was that we are not the first hosts this year using that phone and who would have had to contact a warden. Once we had the 5th wheel set up, we got our first host issue. We didn’t even have a chance to read all the manuals we were given. Geeesh. One of the three bath houses had both sinks in the women’s bathroom plugged and overflowing with water still running. We knew we needed to wear our safety vests when riding on the gator, so we grabbed those, found the gator key and drove down to see what we were dealing with. By the time we arrived, the water had stopped running and both sinks were full. Now what do we do??? Well that is up to you, there is no clear direction in all those manuals. We were told by another host to just use common sense. Ok then. Rick tried to take saran wrap and unplug them but that did not work. Most of the water on the floor had gone down the floor drain and there were no puddles. We then hung an out of order sign on that bathroom and locked the door. Getting back to the site we filled out a maintenance ticket we found in the bin with the manuals and looked through the manuals for what to do next. Do we call maintenance on a Thursday night? Do we call the office? Do we wait until the next day and give it to someone? How fast do they come out to fix it? Are we supposed to do more to fix it? All great questions with no answers in any of the manuals or bins. We decided to wait until the morning until the seasoned host was coming over to show us around. We had the bathroom out of order and locked so the issue couldn’t get worse, however it was an inconvenience to the campers on that end of the park. We still do not know how long it should take before something gets addressed from a ticket we write up, because there are some tickets already in and some other showers and toilets out of order. When we asked another host, he just said, it is not real speedy. I guess we will see. This is certainly a departure from our corporate lives where there were step by step action plans and set expectations. I have read from other full-timers blogs that this is an adjustment that will take time. I do however want to mention to the office staff who we have been communicating with prior to starting, that it would really be helpful for a new host to have some sort of “A day in the life of…” or one document that gives you and idea of what your daily duties would be and some examples of other tasks that could pop up AND what the maintenance ticket process should look like. I don’t think this has been too much of an issue with many of the folks being return hosts but it sure would help us newbies out! Ok, thanks for letting me rant for a minute. Don’t get me wrong, we like camp hosting and talking with folks. We even had one camper stop by while we were emptying trash and chat for just over an hour! Campers love the park and are happy to see a friendly face to answer questions and just say “Hi.” We love toddling around on the gator, checking sites, writing down the site #’s of those that will be leaving in the next day or two so we know how busy we will be on a given day. That really helps us to plan our personal stuff and sightseeing. So far we have only gotten out to do some laundry, visit a winery and orchard for some much needed “supplies”, visit the little local grocery store and a quick breakfast to use their wifi. That brings up another issue we ran into…cell and internet. Being the campground that is the furthest out from the entrance and the rest of the village of Fish Creek, our cell and internet is pretty much non-existent. Our Verizon phones may get 1 bar of 4G intermittently but my AT&T phone is non-existent. We recently switched to a unlimited plan for the AT&T phone and also received free TV (think mini-Directv Now plan) that did not count against our data or hotspot. Well, so much for using that while we are here. We did find out that if we go down to the concession store at the beach, they do have wifi, albeit a bit weak and VERY popular. We are managing and it has given us a bit of a break from being contantly “on”. Apologies to everyone if these posts are a bit further apart, but it is difficult to get down to the beach and we are a bit gun-shy after our first trip down to read a couple emails and check FB. We took a ride down on the gator and had our camp host vests on while we sat outside the store checking our phones. After about 10 minutes an older gentleman wandered over and began to tell us about how long he has been coming to this park and everything he felt was wrong with it, what is not working and just general complaining…over and over and over again. We listened, painfully and throughout the discussion we mentioned that the park really wanted visitor feedback and suggested he fill out one of the suggestion cards, saying that if they didn’t know about his concerns, they wouldn’t have a chance to address them. Little did we know, and we were told later by other camp hosts that he is very well known and this is his usual MO. They also mentioned that him and his wife go through all of the campgrounds looking at the campsites and complain when the camphosts take any wood left behind. We think they are looking for leftovers for themselves and sure enough, we saw his wife in sites at a campground they are not staying in. It certainly takes all kinds. I would say they are the exception and not the rule, as most campers are very friendly. Since that encounter we have not had a chance to get back to the beach for some wifi and we are very keen to watch for places that offer free wifi, like the cute little restaurant outside the park entrance, Julie’s Café, that offers it. We have already visited them for a breakfast to take advantage of that little luxury. As for TV, we have been fortunate to get several local channels, although at times they fade in and out. I also mentioned that they have a wonderful theater with 3 different shows during the summer season that are very popular throughout Door County. It is an open air theater and all shows are at night, under the stars. We have been to Peninsula State Park several times and unfortunately have never been to a show. However, yesterday, the marketing director for the theater stopped by to introduce herself and provide promotional materials to hand out to the campers. She also provided us with complimentary tickets to each of the three shows and then gave us a couple more for our visitors that will join us later in August. What a pleasant surprise!!! So overall, we really like being here and look forward to getting a routine going so that we can plan some outings and our routine trips to the grocery store and laundromat. More to come on our adventures here and how we manage some of our creature comforts that we have come to really appreciate here, like wifi, showers and empty RV tanks. SHOP AMAZON HERE
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