You Volunteer, but what does that Mean? What do you DO???

 The most often questions we hear are; "What is fulltiming?" and "What does a volunteer do?"

For us these two things are pretty tightly intertwined.  The first question's answer is pretty straight-forward.  We live in our 5th wheel RV, all the time, year 'round.  There is no house, condo or apartment, just the RV.  As simple as that answer may be it still leaves some folks scratching their heads.  They just can't wrap their head around the concept of fulltiming.  Mostly it is people that have never been on an RV trip, i.e. if there is no room service, then I don't go.  To them the RV/camping life is too 'roughing it'.  But that is a pretty narrow generalization, there are lots of other reasons people don't see the beauty in fulltiming.  Now don't get me wrong, there is a huge range of fulltiming lifestyles.  It runs from the rig that has been procured and placed in a long term campground, never to be moved until it is hauled to the bone yard or the rig fitted with equipment allowing off-grid living for weeks or months at a time.  Then there is the in-between, that's us.  We have a rig with a comfortable living space and modern conveniences.  So far, in ten years of fulltiming, we have always been in a developed campground.  Some were less developed than others but we always had power and water.

And that is where it gets interesting in regards to volunteering.  Our volunteering has ranged across federal and state agencies.  Specifically; National Parks, National Monuments, National Wildlife Refuges, Corps of Engineers, and Georgia State Parks.  In every single case if we were just tourists we would have had no hook-ups or partial hook-ups.  In some cases there were no camping opportunities at all, it was only as a volunteer did we have the chance to "live" in-park with full hook-ups and other amenities.  But we have also had our share of being tourists, usually a month or two at a time while going from one volunteer position to another.

Week at Hard Labor Creek, GA State Parks

Overnighting at a private CG on the Mississippi.  A layover spot on our way to a volunteer job.

Home base, Livingston, TX.  This is where we do jury duty, vote, pay taxes, etc.

Caprock Canyon, TX State Park.  This is stomping grounds from our youth.  A week here between volunteer jobs.

City Park, Borger, TX.  This is where Cyndee and I grew up.  This spot not suitable for summer because power is limited and can't keep one a/c running.  Multiple stays over twenty-two years ranging from a couple of nights to a couple of weeks.

Cheyenne Mtn, CO State Parks.  A long weekend layover on our way to a volunteer job.

Homolovi, AZ State Parks.  Several days in the desert, with full hook-ups, while on the way to our Grand Canyon volunteer job.

North Rim, Grand Canyon National Park, AZ.  Two summers at this location as campground hosts.  All total, eight months with full hook-ups in a campground that has no hook-ups in its 88 public campsites.

Big Bend National Park, TX.  Seven months in the housing section, aka Panther Junction, of this very remote location.  It was 109 miles to the nearest full-service grocery shopping.  We had a nine mile commute to our visitor center hosting gig in the caldera of an ancient volcano.

More desert living.  Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge, NM.  No campground here, just two RV pads for live-in-park volunteers.

Taking a break from volunteering.  Dodge City, KS.  Have stayed here more than once while going to or coming from getting maintenance work done at the factory that built our rig.

Junction City, KS.  Home of New Horizons RV manufacturing.  That's us getting wheeled into the maintenance barn.  So far we have never gotten out of this place in less than a month.  But they do arrange their work so that we give the rig to them each morning and they return it to us each evening.  We "camp" at the factory while repairs are underway.

Fort Fredericka National Monument, St Simons Island, GA.  Five months in this isolated spot adjacent to a maintenance building for the park.  We were visitor center hosts again for this park.

Chattahoochee Bend State Park, GA.  Campground hosts at this park for 14 months.  This park kept asking us to stay and take the next volunteer session.  But you can only clean bathrooms for so long, after more than a year we had to find something to do that did not include bleach and a mop.

Earlier I said some campgrounds were less developed than others.  This place would fit that description.  Literally, an asphalt parking lot with power, water and sewer.  

Allatoona Lake, GA, Corps of Engineers.  We've been contract campground hosts and general services volunteers off and on at this facility from 2017 to present.

Okay, I think I have sufficiently described the idea of fulltiming.  It is living in the RV and only the RV.  Even when said RV is in the shop for a month at a time getting routine maintenance or major repairs.  But I have only nibbled around the edges of what we do.  Let's just see about that.

From the very beginning of us planning for retirement, which was well before the idea of fulltiming, we knew that for our health and well-being we would have to have something to do.  You can't just read books and watch TV.  You could spend a lot of time in the gym to cover the physical activity that one needs to keep up but that won't cover the challenges that the brain needs to be healthy.  Studies have shown that when a person is mentally challenged with new experiences that the whole aging process is slowed.  When the thought of fulltiming came up it also provided a whole plethora of ways to have new experiences.  But fulltiming alone wasn't going to be enough.  We learned in our early years of studying and preparing to be fulltimers that living as if one is on vacation all the time is not sustainable, physically or financially.  If you tried to live at the pace of a vacation day in and day out, year over year you would be burned out and broke in no time.  So finding a way to go places and have new experiences at a sustainable pace became the goal.  For us, volunteering fit that bill.

Just saying that we volunteer is not a good way to describe what we do.  Volunteering is a big umbrella that covers a lot of things.  I don't want to bore you with the minutia of everything we do but I will drill down a little bit under some of the big ticket things.

Campground Host

We have been campground hosts as volunteers or contractors four times for a total of thirty months.  This includes one National Park (twice), one State Park, and one Corps of Engineers campground.  Each had similar job duties but each operated as influenced by local agency culture.

In each gig we participated in the registration/checking in/checking out process to some degree or the other.  Simply hanging 'reserved' tags on campsites all the way up to being a reservation agent, creating reservations on demand for walk-up campers.  But then there were the routine chores of being a host.  It differed from agency to agency but it was always relatively simple tasks that required physical exertion.

In National Parks we interacted directly with law enforcement, which were also the EMS.  We came away with quite a few law action and emergency medical response stories.

The ubiquitous reservation tag.  Hang them in the evening for late arrivals, pull them in the morning from the departures.

We performed our own maintenance on the support equipment we used.

A one-off job assignment:  Drive 3.5 hrs to St. George, UT to retrieve an ATV.

                                 

Every day job:  Campground upkeep.  Clean and remove firepit ashes from each vacated campsite.

When all the little buckets were full their contents were transferred to the large metal containers and when they were full they were driven, by us, to a dump seven miles away.

Driving, that brings up another point.  Something else we do is take training, lots of training.  To be able to drive a federally owned vehicle you have to suffer through hours and hours of on-line training modules, take tests and score nearly 100%.  And the heck of it is these things expire.  You keep having to re-take them.

Collecting entrance fees at a GA state park.

Performing "backup" for a park manager that was evicting a guy for harassing a girls camp.  The backup duties consisted of staying way back and having a finger ready to dial 911 if things went sideways. They didn't.

Cleaning the bath house daily was routine at one park.  Snake wrangling added a little excitement every now and then.

Campground maintenance; reseeding a drought damaged traffic island.

Campground maintenance; repainting traffic stripes.

Campground hosts for Chattahoochee Bend State Park
are responsible for mowing the campground.

Campground gatehouse operations. This particular campground
our hours were from 7:00am to 10:30pm.  Fifteen and a half hours 
 a day in the gatehouse for four consecutive days, plus, "on call" all night
for those same four days.

Visitor Center Hosts

Visitor center hosting is whole different ballgame.  Your interaction with the public is significantly different than that of campground hosting.  Instead of working in the recreation side of the house you are, in our case, always a part of the interpretive group.  Each of our visitor center gigs has been accompanied with copious amounts of training.  Of course we were trained as campground hosts too but that was usually about rules, regulations and campground operations.  As visitor center hosts our training was more like being back in school.  We learned history, local lore, biology, botany, geology, geography, and archeology to name a few.  At our gig at Big Bend the training lasted for two weeks, 5 days a week, eight hours a day.  By the time we finished we had completed the equivalent of the college courses Interpretive 101 and 102.  Loved it!

There was also training on the mechanics of operating a visitor center.  It is common for the federally operated visitors centers to have imbedded within them an independent "Friends of the Park" book store/gift shop.  In each of our jobs we had to learn to run both businesses simultaneously.  Two cash registers, two methods of banking, information services for park visitors, book store/curios shop clerk for Friends of the Park. 

Chisos Mountains Visitor Center, Big Bend National Park
Nine mile commute up the mountain from where we were "camped".

Cyndee keeping track of the below bear's location and reporting to rangers.

This Mexican Black Bear sow had two cubs with her and she was
highly agitated by nearby hikers.  We coordinated with rangers by radio to 
clear the area.

A more docile moment of using the bookstore's reference material 
to help answer visitor's questions.

Cyndee at the Big Bend NP Visitor Center desk, studying up on 
the hundreds of bird species that visit the park.

The calm before the storm.  We got the diorama all cleaned up and ready
for the impending spring break.  People are going to descend on this place
by the thousands. 

And there it is.  This scene is almost all day, every day during the
month-long Texas spring break.

The Rio Grande left its banks and pushed copious amounts of mud
into the historic buildings bordering the hot springs.

Another one-off job was the clean-up of the flood.

All-volunteer work crew for the clean-up.  Two of us, myself and the
person in the center, are visitor center hosts and the others are attached to 
law enforcement and maintenance.

River patrol.  Really just more of a day of fun on the Rio Grande, but at the
National Park's direction.  That's Cyndee talking to our friends Julie and Larry.  Nine years later
we are still in touch with them.  Twice in later years we have met up in north Georgia.

Another job in the desert.  Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico

Familiar territory, visitor desk adjacent to bookstore/gift shop.
Two businesses, two registers, two banking procedures.
That dark spot in the back is Cyndee stocking the store.

Snake wrangling. 
On this day the refuge's biologist had me photograph
him doing a capture and relocate.  That's a diamond back 
rattlesnake he's getting ahold of.

Double duty - litter pick-up and venomous snake spotting.
Not all visitor center work is in the visitor center.
Cyndee was the photographer, keeping her distance from where the snakes might be.

Fort Frederica National Monument.
Very small park with a very small visitor center on St. Simons Island, GA.
Our winter here the locals said it was the coldest in 30 years.  Lucky us.

To work here we had to get schooled in pre-revolutionary war history.
Specifically, the 13th Colony, Georgia.
And also here we operated the theatre as we did in New Mexico.

In each of our Visitor Center jobs the work extends outdoors,
 interaction with the public in a different setting but still
 answering questions, leading tours, etc.

Each of the visitor center jobs were similar in that the bulk of our time (24 to 32 hrs/week) was spent interacting with the public, answering the same questions what seemed like a thousand times a day.  But that was the job and we were happy to do it.  Also, the one-day-a-week in the field assignments were always an adventure.  But even with the long list I've assembled so far, it barely scratches the surface of all the things we do as visitor center hosts.

General Services Volunteer

In everything we had done, up to a point, the volunteer position was a singular job that was fairly rigidly defined and narrow in scope.  But then we came upon the Corps of Engineers at a couple of places that had what I call "general services".  The Corps has a campground on their property that can hold (in our experience) ten self contained RVs.  By this (I think) they mean they do not accommodate tents and class B's.  These ten spots are occupied by singles or pairs and are assigned jobs by the Volunteer Coordinator and your individual skills.  The variety of jobs are huge.  But generally speaking there are front-office, back-office, trail maintenance, landscaping, carpentry, photography, recreation services, land management services and radio dispatcher, to name a few.

In the last few years in our work with the Corps we have been involved in quite a few back-office assignments.  Together, Cyndee and I have created databases in which paper files of land records were digitized from documents dating as far back as the 1940's and spreadsheets that have automated timekeeping of volunteer hours as well as automating word processing documents that are training and operations manuals for campground hosts. 

Cyndee working on the dock permits database that we designed.

The Corps' idea of a leaf blower is a farm tractor with an industrial blower fan attached to the PTO.  It takes this level of machinery to clear all the leaf-fall in seven campgrounds with 500 campsites.

Cyndee at Allatoona Lake's largest campground, McKinney. 
150 sites and several miles of road to clear of leaves and pine straw.

It is not glamorous but desperately needs to be done, trash pick-up.  It is depressing to think of how many people deliberately dump garbage, large and small, anywhere they please.

Cyndee showing the truck-load of garbage retrieved from 
one small parking lot of a jetty.

Some days you get a soft job.  This day was for
taking surveys of campground visitors.

On this warm day in September we drew
a mowing job for the disc golf course.

And then again on a frosty day in November.

The trailer the volunteers use (two pictures up) was looking pretty sad.  Corrosion was its primary coating.  I got the okay to rehabilitate it over the winter.

Corrosion delt with.  Wire brushed, two coats of rust
reformer and three coats of paint.  As a bonus I added
a job box to carry chocks, fuel, tie-downs and hand tools.

We manned water safety booths at lake events, county fairs and convention center expos.

There is always something that needs painting.

This painting assignment came courtesy of some graffiti vandals.
Cyndee and I have personally painted this overlook deck three
times due to graffiti and we think that nearly all the volunteers
in The Village have painted it as well for the same reason.

In 2019 the Corps of Engineers Allatoona Lake Project switched from the honor vault fee collection system (put your $5 in an envelope and drop it in the slot) to an automated, credit card only fee machine.  We happened to be around during the inauguration and lucked out on getting trained to do routine servicing of the machine.  So now instead of riding around with a ranger and collecting all the honor vaults, taking them to the office, counting all the money, rolling the coins and wrapping the bills, we now just visit each fee machine every Thursday and clean the credit card readers, clean the print heads and restock the rolls of receipt paper.

In addition to all the attention the inside gets, Cyndee puts a fine point on the exterior of the machines too.  Spiders just love to make their webs across the display screen.

There are a lot of electronics and mechanical mechanisms in those orange cabinets.  A roll of paper can produce several thousand receipts.  Holiday weekends can sometimes go through a whole roll and we'll have to make an extra run to keep the machines running.

A winter activity is the building of fish attractors.  We find a patch of bamboo, considered to be invasive, and cut a large quantity and bring it back to our volunteer work shop.  There it is sized and cut to length for the purpose of building a "pyramid".  We then take Christmas trees that we have picked up from collection stations around the lake and mount it in the interior of the bamboo pyramid.  Concrete blocks (which we make) are attached as anchor weights.  The Corps will "order" anywhere from 15 to 30 of these and then we will transport them to the lake and load on a barge, to be taken to pre-defined locations, sunk and geotagged.

Fry/minnows and other tasty morsels love hanging out in the branches of the bamboo pyramid.  That in turn attracts the big fish on the hunt.  Fishermen GPS locate these attractors and throw out an anchor and try their hand at getting one of the big ones to bite.

The collection of Christmas trees yields hundreds more than what is used for the bamboo pyramids.  All these trees will be staged at one of the fishing jetties that are located all around the lake with the final purpose being to anchor them to the lakebed, creating large fish attractors that are accessible by people bank fishing.

It was a sunny but cold day in January when we started collecting trees.

Cyndee drags the trees up to the truck and I lift them in and stack them to maximize the number we move each time.  This usually takes a few days to get everything moved.

Once staged at the appropriate jetty, each tree trunk must be
drilled so that the anchor wire can be threaded through and secured to the lake bed.

Anchoring the trees to the lake bed is a big day for volunteers.  Not only do people from our Volunteer Village come out but so do several fishing clubs, the Department of Natural Resources and Rangers from our project.  Cyndee and I get switched to being photographers for this event.

Photography is another big slice of what we do.  We have contributed images to each of our visitor center jobs but the Corps of Engineers has really called on us for documenting activity/events, providing social media images, internal newsletter images, and hanging art for conference rooms.

There is so much more but this post is getting a little windy.  I think I have covered the question of what we do and exemplified the multitude and diverse jobs we have enjoyed for the past ten years.