Author: Lee and Tracy

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Second Year – By the Numbers

Year Two of Full timing was another year of great change so I thought it was worth several posts summarizing the experience.  At the end of year one I wrote a “by the numbers” post Year 1 overview and a post on the  emotional aspects.  I liked that formula and plan on doing the same thing this time.   Also, since I am tracking our budget based on the calendar year, there will be another post covering Year 2 expenses and revenue in January.

Travel Information

I tried several ways to create one map showing our route, but finally just gave up and created two.  The first picture shows the first part of the year and the second shows Alaska and the return back to the states.

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November through May

2016-route-2

May through November

 

Truck Miles – The trailer traveled 15,558 miles in Year Two. This year we did not have a second vehicle for the entirety (I turned in my company car last year) and the truck traveled 33,710 miles.  Thus, we traveled an additional 18,152 miles with the truck alone.  For those who are interested,  the new engine (which was replaced right before we started Year Two has 33,915 miles on it (since being installed) and the truck itself (which is what the warranty goes by) has 58,743 miles.  The number of miles we put on the truck is a concern, but since the Alaska trip caused a spike in both the trailer and truck numbers, we really think we need at least another year to get a feel for what this will look like over time. (I’m not concerned about the truck miles so much. It’s a diesel, and I’m told that they go trillions of miles. – Lee) 

Travel Pattern – We still like to pick an area and stay in it for an extended period of time, but this year we spent more time than expected traveling to get to places.  The main cause of that was business and family obligations on the east coast that necessitated a cross country trip right before Alaska.  We don’t regret that decision because it allowed us to attend my nephew’s adoption party and an RV-Dreams Rally, but from a travel perspective it certainly added some additional miles.  This may not be an unusual occurrence though as we prefer to travel in the West, but most of our family resides in the east.  Again we will need to see how that plays out over time.  Despite the often crazy travel schedule though we did get to spend chunks of time in different areas, and those are listed below.

  • Weott, CA – 4 weeks volunteering at Humboldt State Park in the Redwood Forest
  • Quartzite, AZ – We spent roughly 5 weeks in Quartzsite (we left, then came back)
  • City of Rocks, NM – We spent 10 days  with Cori and Greg at the City of Rocks which was a major bucket list item of mine
  • Glenallen, AK – We spent almost 4 months in Alaska work kamping, fulfilling one of Lee’s major bucket list items
  • Sidney, MT – We spent 39 days working the beet harvest
  • New Braunfels, TX – We will be spending almost 2 months selling Christmas trees.

In between these stays we mostly traveled, with usual pattern being 300-350 miles a day and an overnight stay then moving on.  We did spend a couple of weeks last March exploring the Tuscon/Benson area with Cori, Greg, Bill, and Kelly.  And we spent some time exploring New Mexico on our own, but mainly we just traveled to get from point A to point B with a few stops to see friends/family along the way.  This is not necessarily our preference, by the way, but so far a couple of factors are driving that.  First and foremost, our schedule of commitments has been tight and necessitated long travels days with minimal meandering along the way.  But to be completely honest we (or I should say I) am not that great at just wandering aimlessly.  I would like to be, but when I was faced with a full month of travel days to get from New Mexico to South Carolina, I almost immediately started to fill that time up with friend visits.  It was wonderful, we saw tons of people as we went across the country, but Lee was a little disappointed that I didn’t leave more open days.  I tried, I really did, but was really uncomfortable without a schedule of some kind.  Eventually though we would both like to see what traveling with no set schedule is like, I’m just not sure when I’ll be ready for that to be honest.

 Truck and RV Repairs and Upgrades

Although I will be covering this in the financial summary as well, I think this discussion also deserves a place here.  The amount of Truck and RV Repairs in Year 2 was more frequent that I expected. I shouldn’t have been that surprised as we put more mileage on the trailer in one year than some people put on one in it’s lifetime, but we both were.   Our two year manufacturer’s warranty on the RV expired in May and we developed several issues right after that expiration.  Although we have an extended warranty that covers some of the costs, not everything (as you will see) was covered.

  • January – We spent around $300 this month on a fresh water pump and portable fresh water tank (along with other miscellaneous repair items) while we were in Quartzsite.  We needed those items to boon dock comfortably and they were one-time expenditures we were expecting.
  • February – Lee accidentally left our surge protector in the parking lot campground of Circus Circus.  We called as soon as we realized it, but it was already gone, not surprising in that atmosphere. It was going to cost around $200 to replace, but Lee wanted to upgrade and hardwire the surge protector and voltage regulator inside the rig so this could never happen again.  The upgrade cost us an unexpected $500 in total, but we never have to worry about them being stolen and it saves Lee time during his setup process.
  • April – We bought 4 new rear dually tires because their treads were too low for the trip to Alaska which cost $1,013. Lee shopped around for these tires and ultimately got the best deal possible (we ended up using Costco), but anyway you slice it, it’s not cheap.  I was surprised that the tread was worn that quickly, but we had put over 40,000 miles on the truck at this point. 
  • May – Right after we replaced the dually tires the shackle strap broke on our RV.  Since the manufacturer’s warranty ran out, we relied on our extended warranty, but that would only cover the one broken strap.  We, in conjunction with our repair tech, felt an upgrade on all straps was called for, especially with our upcoming trip to Alaska.  We paid for the non broken straps to be fixed. Our cost was $747 and this was totally unexpected. Worse, this repair cost us a week of travel and stopped us from spending that week with our daughter.  The time bothered me more than the money, but ultimately I felt grateful this happened in a campground near my sister and not in the middle of the Yukon.
  • September – The truck air conditioner died and we were having problems with the alignment on the truck.  The AC unit was covered under warranty, but the alignment was not, which ended up costing us $448.  This repair was incredibly stressful, because the truck was 3 hours away in Wasilla and we were in a rental for a couple of weeks and we had a VERY hard time getting a commitment that the work would be done by the time we needed to leave Alaska for Sidney.  On the plus side, it turned out that a tie rod was extremely loose and if we hadn’t had the alignment checked, it is very likely we could have lost that tie rod and done significant damage.  And again this could have happened on our trip home, possibly in the Yukon.  I mention the Yukon specifically because there are VERY long stretches with minimal services and that is one of the worst places I can think of to have a major repair issue.

Overall we had $3,208 in incremental costs this year and that is with an extended RV warranty, full truck warranty, and truck maintenance plan.  And unlike last year I don’t feel this is anomalous. Rather, I think over time these costs have the potential to increase as everything gets older.

Top 10 Things We Saw

  1. The Redwood Groves.  We started the year with fulfilling a childhood dream of mine.  Touching those trees was simply magical. I have never felt closer to nature than in those moments.  Yes, we spent a month there and it rained for 10 straight days, but those first few days in the groves were priceless.
  2. The Rose Bowl Parade.  Another dream of mine since childhood and it definitely did not disappoint. I have watched this parade every year since childhood and Lee even talked me into getting our first big screen TV by talking about watching football and the Rose Bowl Parade on it, so it was a big deal to me to see it in person.  (I’m not stupid. I know my audience. -Lee) What made it even better was we attended the event via an Escapees HOP we met some great people and attended some events we probably would not have seen under other circumstances.
  3. Seeing and then walking on Worthington Glacier, fulfilled a major bucket list item for me.  Lee said it was one of the Top 5 things he had done since we started the lifestyle.  What made it very special, was it had a surprise waterfall inside the glacier. For us it was the perfect day.
  4. The Lost Coast was one of our long drives that unexpectedly ended in a magical place.  The Lost Coast of California is wild and isolated and the herd of Elk put the experience over the top.  I am not a tent camper, but if we had one, I would have happily pitched it and spent the night there it was so wonderful.
  5. There are so many amazing moments in Alaska, I could fill this list with them, but my favorite was the Denali Hwy.  It was wild, it was vast, and it was untamed, and we did it together.
  6. Spending my 50th birthday with friends on a Glacier Cruise and seeing the glacier from the sea was incredible. The whole reason I wanted to go to Alaska was I wanted to spend my 50th birthday somewhere cool, and having Kelly, Jo, Bill, and Ben to experience it with made it so incredibly special.
  7. Seeing the Very Large Array. Because this really isn’t located near anything else you have to work to see it.  Lee really wanted to go so we made a special route just to see it.  Personally, I wasn’t that interested but once we got there it blew me away.  The size of it was amazing, the price was reasonable, and it had an excellent walking tour.  Many things in life don’t live up to their press, but others exceed the experience you think you will have.  This fell in that category.
  8. I am still a little kid at heart and visiting North Pole, Alaska was a real treat.  Yes it was kitschy, but it was also really, really cool and I love how Lee not only let’s me have those kid-like moments but also delights in them with me.
  9. Camping in the City of Rocks was a mental picture I had of what this lifestyle should be like.  The weather wasn’t the best, but the campsites were amazing and experiencing it with our friends Cori and Greg  made it a special experience.
  10. We saw 7 Different Wild Mammals in one day. The drive to and from Canada was pretty rough for us, but each way there was one magical day that was packed full of bears, moose, and other critters.  That day made the long trip worth it both times.

When people talk to me about the lifestyle they often ask “Is it worth it?”.  I am going to talk about that more in the emotional arc post.  The numbers do tell a story though, and in a nutshell I think they show that from a sheer experience standpoint, so worth it.  In one year I saw more amazing things than I saw in many years during my “old” life.  Not only that, I spent quality time with friends and family that would not have been possible in my old life.  So yes, Year 2 was totally worth it.

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First Time Selling Christmas Trees – Surprise Guests and More Setup

After training we were in a waiting mode until the team came to unload the trailer.  I had lots of admin stuff to do (signed up for next years ACA for example), but Lee was pretty restless. The constant cloud cover/rain didn’t help.  We were so looking forward to sunny skies but it has rained at least part of everyday we have been here.  Plus we didn’t really feel like we could leave, because we were told that they would call us before coming to do the setup, but we had no idea when that was.  We could have left of course, but it didn’t feel right, especially since I hadn’t received any walk-in applicants and I was started to get nervous about that. Thankfully though, we saw some movement on Tuesday when our holding tank and port-a-potty was delivered.  Things were starting to roll!

Delivery of our tank and port=a=potty. You can see the fire station behind us in the pic

Delivery of our tank and porta-a-potty.  We are getting weekly service I think

Can't get away from these things and unfortunately it is relatively close to the rig, but no where else to put it

Can’t get away from these things and unfortunately it is relatively close to the rig, but no where else to put it

The large tank is on the ground. We were told it would go behind the rig, but there is not enough room so we had to put it in the front. Hopefully there is no smell

The large holding tank is on the ground, by the fence.  We were told it would go behind the rig, but there was not enough room so we had to put it in the front. Hopefully there is no smell

Thankfully a dear friend of ours Rick was passing through Texas and made sure he routed himself by New Braunfels, which was a welcome distraction.  I first met Rick at the RV-Dreams Reunion rally and really got to know him when we were in the same boat on a white water rafting trip.  He actually fell out of the boat at one point and myself, Mike, and the guide worked really hard to get him back in.  Since we were in a section of rapids that was particularly dangerous it was pretty darn scary and the experience bonded Rick and I for life. After that experience we could have both wandered our separate ways. It happens; you meet people, grow somewhat close, and then may never see them again, but Rick went to some trouble.  He stopped and spent my 49th birthday with me when we were in Minnesota.  He made a special trip to see a group of us Dreamers when we were in Quartzsite last year, and he came to see us on our lot selling Christmas Trees.

Rick is a widower who travels solo with his dog Maxine.  He and his wife dreamed about doing this in their retirement, and he decided to continue on with that dream, partly in her memory.  In the last year he has sold the house, purchased a “new to him” rig, made a trip to England, and had several volunteer camp host positions. He looks so great.  Happy, relaxed, and is loving the lifestyle.  He’s a social guy and loves to stay busy, so these volunteer positions are perfect for him.  It helps keep his costs down, he’s been treated very well with every position he has had, and has really enjoyed “keeping busy and doing something productive.” I have to say after hearing about it, I love his life and am a little jealous.  We loved our two volunteer positions and in our mind there is no contest between those and any paying position we have had  when it comes to perks and how we were treated.  His experience has been the same, and I am so happy for him that he is enjoying himself.   I knew things were going well from reading his blog  On The Road with Maxine and Me , but seeing how great he looked in person, really solidified that.  Anyways, Rick and Maxine came and hung out in the tent and it was fun for Maxine because we had a huge fenced in lot for her to play in.  Since it was still empty, she had the run of the place, and we had a great time chatting and catching up.

Rick

Rick

Maxine was having a blast

Maxine was having a blast

I made some pinto beans and andouille sausage in the Instant pot. It turned out ok. Maxine liked it :)

I made some pinto beans and andouille sausage in the Instant pot. It turned out OK. Maxine liked it 🙂

Then Rick decided he wanted to cook dinner for us.  We like to cook for people on their travel days, but since we are working this can get complicated, and Rick loves to cook for people so it was OK by us.  He went and stayed nearby at a wonderful Corps of Engineers park, Potters Creek near Canyon Lake where he was staying on a beautiful site for only $13 a night with his senior discount. Since most of the private RV parks in the area are in the $40 – $50 range this is a steal and the first-come-first-serve worked to his advantage as he got one of the nicest sites I have ever seen in a park anywhere.

Rick's new rig

Rick’s new rig

The side view

The side view

His "yard"

His “yard”

Beats the heck out of our gravel lot

Beats the heck out of the view from our gravel lot

One of the first things we did was look at the changes Rick made to the rig.  He has a friend who is a carpenter and he changed closets and added drawers to every available space.  Very cool.

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Loved these custom spice racks they built

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The drawer to the right and the lower drawer were both added taking advantage of dead space. They did a nice job matching the wood color. I would never have known

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Great drawer they added under the fridge, again taking advantage of dead space

Dinner was great.  Rick made stuffed pork roast with an orange and cherry glaze and bought Lee pie.  I had made a new desert (was mediocre), but the pie was a huge hit.  Sometimes I think Lee just uses this blog to solicit free pies, because I swear every time we go to someone’s house for dinner they buy him one. (Duuuuude. BE COOL. – Lee) I don’t complain too much since it definitely helps with our food budget (pie ain’t cheap), but I should say for the record I am not a huge fan of pie.  That’s OK, because I am not a big desert eater either, but if you buy Lee a pie at some point down the road, please don’t be upset if I don’t eat it.

Rick had some whiskey for Lee

Rick had some whiskey for Lee

Rick making us dinner

Rick making us dinner

Roast pork. So yummy

Roast pork. So yummy

And a huge pie

And a huge pie

We left pretty early though, because it got dark early and was raining, plus I wanted to watch some of the election coverage.  I’m not going to talk about that here, but I will say I had a tough day on Wednesday.  So, when we got up I decided to go to breakfast.  It’s easier to face things with a good breakfast.  I used my Yelp app to look for local places (thanks Cori and Kelly for getting me to use this because it works very well) and there were less choices than I would have thought.  Many of the breakfast places were Mexican restaurants, and although I love Mexican food, not a huge fan of their breakfast options.  I decided on The Buttermilk Cafe, and although it was on the pricey side it was really nice.  My breakfast was delicious, but Lee was unimpressed by his sausage gravy, both quantity and quality.  I also loved the decor though and anyways it was good we did this, because we got a text saying the setup people would be there by noon.  A few hours notice, reinforced the idea that we really couldn’t travel far, and we were glad we hadn’t scheduled a trip anywhere.

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The eggs were excellent, bacon terrific, and the sourdough really really good. Biscuits were OK, but I’ve definitely had better

Three guys arrived  and we all started unloading the trailer.  An amazing amount of stuff was packed in this trailer and soon stuff was strewn everywhere.  Unfortunately, the trailer was missing some items.  Progress was made, but after 7 hours, there was still lots of work to do.  I was completely heartened by the fact that I got two applicants that came up during the setup process.  One was a teenager who unfortunately was under 18 (can’t hire anyone under 18 because they have to work with power tools), but the other gentleman was perfect.  He lived in the area, was available to work nights and weekends, was a grown-up and had landscaping experience.  I had an impromptu interview in our rig (could have done it outside, but things were a bit chaotic out there, we filled out the paperwork and I hired him on the spot.  I felt sooo much better with at least one hire, and that as everyone said people would just walk up once we were up and running.  Then the day just got better as we were putting up the last of the help wanted signs, Lee got a call from Cori and they had arrived a day early and wanted to come over!!

Unloading the trailer

Unloading the trailer

Lights going up

Lights going up

I’ll talk more about Greg and Cori later, but they are incredibly special to us because we started our journey with them and have been with them on and off over the last two years.  We can tell them anything and since they have known us from the beginning, have a pretty unique perspective on our lives and our journey.  We talked until 11pm and then everyone had to go to bed.  We will be here with them though for the next several weeks, and I am sure we will have lots of opportunities to be with them.  I am particularly excited because we will be with Cori at least (Greg has a work trip he needs to take) for our two year anniversary.  Speaking of which, I really need to get started on that post.  That one requires some research.

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First Time Selling Christmas Trees – Initial Setup and Training

As I stated in the last post, we made arrangements to meet with someone from the company and arrived at our lot.  In our case, the tent and fencing was already in place and it took some maneuvering to get our rig into place, but with help Lee did a great job fitting us into the spot.  The tent is quite large and the fence goes beyond the tent in the back with a little section for our rig.  My biggest concern was our rig would be right on the main road, but this is definitely not the case, and for the other setups we have seen, they are not on the road either.  This company has 15 locations in the San Antonio and surrounding areas, and many of the people who work for them come back year after year.  We did need quite a bit of hose though, and thankfully Lee always carries extra.  The water spigot was pretty far away, but the water pressure is still good despite the hose length and it is city water which is nice.

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Our tent with trailer.  Felt a little bit like I had joined the circus

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The space where out RV is in relation to the tent.

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The gas station next door. The manager is very nice. He came over and introduced himself

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The light from the car wash lights our outside area all night. Since our bedroom is in the back, it isn’t that big of a deal and is really good from a safety perspective

Saturday,  we drove into San Antonio for training at the warehouse and it was clear this was a mature operation.  The owners have been doing this for 30 years and own the tree farm in Oregon along with living here during the Holidays.  After some initial chatting with folks, Lee and I were separated into two different groups.  He went with the men to learn about the care and setup of the trees and I stayed with the women and learned about the paperwork aspect of the job.  As a general rule I am not a huge fan of division of labor by sex, but in this particular case I kind of understood it.  These trees can be as large as 16 feet and and can weigh 175 pounds.  So, the division of labor seems to be based more on physical strength than aptitude.  That being said, I had three returning managers in my training session and they talked about carrying trees.  So although there may be an initial division of labor, it sounds like it’s all hands on deck when things get busy.

Our group jumped right in and started going through the detail.  I received a huge, hard backed three ring binder and several other folders with Lot #12 specific information.  We were encouraged to ask questions and the returning managers jumped in frequently to add more information, and to be honest in the beginning it was a little overwhelming.  The main problem was I completely misunderstood what this was.  My only experience with Christmas trees was buying them from small, corner lots when they were small.  This company is NOT the same as those.  We will be providing 4 types of trees and they are all hand selected by the owner.  Every tree comes with a warranty to live through Christmas as long as they are cared for properly and since they are “high end” trees their care is important.  One of the main things we learned was the timing of when they are fresh cut and watered and there is relatively small window of time when the tree can leave the lot and be put up and in water at the person’t house.  We also sell wreaths, garland, custom made stands, preservatives, floor protective coverings, and watering spouts. Some of these items I had never seen before (I was not alone in that) and others were much more high tech than what I remember from the past.

Along with products we also sell services which include flocking (spraying the tree or wreaths with a paper pulp product that looks like snow), tree delivery, and tree setup.  Along with the overview of these items, we covered in detail different types of coupons and gift certificates, the nightly 3-page sheet that I have to fill out, and cash/credit card accounting.  We also spent a significant amount of time talking about hiring, scheduling, and managing the temporary employees.  After 6 hours my head was full and I went home with my cash register to practice on and an arm full of documentation to read.  I also took an additional 4 pages of notes that included best practices from the more experienced managers that were there.  It was about as different an experience as one could be from the beet harvest.  This company gives you the tools and guidelines to sell the trees, but also encourages independent thought and ideas.  The atmosphere is very entrepreneurial and best practices and new ideas were all openly discussed and encouraged.  I was very impressed by this, but in many ways this presents it’s own set of challenges.

I spent my career working for large corporations and have little experience in owning my own business.  We are learning with Lee’s video and RV Tech business, but this is still not a strong area for me.  This will definitely challenge me though, and I walked away thinking this would be good for me as I will get a chance to stretch those “muscles” a bit.  Plus the pay structure is designed (flat rate with commission) to encourage out of the box thinking.  With that much openness though there is also ambiguity and you should keep that in mind before considering one of these positions. If you are a person who likes a very specific set of job duties and regular daily routine, this may not be the job for you.  We are managers in the truest sense and expected to deal with most issues autonomously.  We were given mentors (the other tent in New Braunfels) and thankfully the smallest operation in the group.  Actually, I was really glad about that.  I like a challenge, but the complexity of the operation is intimidating enough that I was happy our tree sale volume may actually be half what the busier lots is.  Plus with a low set of expectations regarding sales, it’s much easier to succeed than competing with a very successful previous year.

Most importantly I liked the people.  Everyone was very nice, and genuinely said “Call me if you need anything.”  We were handed a list of everyone’s phone numbers and so far folks have made themselves available to answer questions.  That may change once we get busier, but my plan is to learn everything I can in advance.  The cash register has a training mode, and there is lots of documentation to dig into that will keep me busy.  So what’s next?  Our trailer was delivered Sunday and a team of people will be coming sometime this week to help set everything up.  I also have several other business items that were put on hold during the beet harvest that need to be taken care of.  Cori and Greg hit town on Thursday and if it ever quits raining we would like to find time to do a little exploring.  There’s definitely plenty to do, and the main trick has been not letting it overwhelm us, but to try and tackle things in some sort of systemic way.  I feel like we made good progress on that today, so I am taking a little break and writing this post.  Now I need to get back to my to do list.

Oh and here’s a few potential challenges  I learned about selling Christmas trees.  I thought were interesting.

  • The trees are roughly one year older than their height.  So a 7 foot tree was planted 8 years ago.  That makes the current supply of trees dependent on what the growers projected in the past.  It’s interesting, because the availability of trees does change from year to year and is somewhat cyclical.
  • Fire ants are a problem here.  They can get into the trees and that’s not good.  I have spent some time, treating every ant hill I can find, but there are lots of them.  Hopefully the treatment works and this is a non issue.
  • Feral cats can be a problem.  We have two that regularly hang out at night in the car wash next to us and in the past people have had them climb into trees or even spray on them.  The key is to make sure all trees are inside the tent at night.  Flocking is done in the open air, so these will need to be moved inside before we close.
  • The whole Happy Holidays versus Merry Christmas is still a thing when selling trees.  When I was in a corporate environment working with people of many different faiths and cultures I was always careful to tell people to enjoy their holidays, but I think if they are buying a Christmas tree a “Merry Christmas” should come along with it.  Plus here in Texas the sentiment is firmly in the camp of not “taking Christ out of Christmas” and you can offend people if you say Happy Holidays instead.  I have always felt the whole argument was silly, personally, but I will be extra careful to say Merry Christmas in greetings.
  • If the local power goes out you could find yourself doing things by hand.  Since we have solar and a generator, we could run an extension cord from our rig and keep going.  That may seem obvious, but I am glad they said it because I may not have thought of that in the heat of the moment.
  • It’s super important to immediately tag and move a tree that is being placed on hold.  If the tree isn’t tagged you could forget which one.  Not cool.  If it isn’t moved to the back, all of sudden people want to buy it and that could become an issue.  I get it as the kids and I spent way too much time trying to find the “perfect” tree.  To find it and then lose it would have been very upsetting.
  • Service animals can be a challenge.  By law you are not allowed to ask people about their dogs, so people bring them into the lot with expected results.  Dogs and trees often equals peeing.  Some of these trees are very expensive and you can’t easily get the urine smell out of the tree.  Again, hopefully this is a non-issue, but will have to see how it goes.  If people carry their dogs that solves the problem, but not everyone is willing to do that. (Technically, you are only allowed to ask two things of a person with a service dog. 1) Is it a service dog? and 2) What task or work has it been trained to perform. That’s it. Nothing else. Also, interestingly, a business has the right to charge the customer for an item if it is damaged by the animal. So this is a non-issue. – Lee) 
  • Not surprisingly constant cell phone usage is a problem with the younger work force. I am not sure there is any perfect solution for this one, but it should be addressed in the interview process. (I am 100% certain of the solution. No cell phone use while they’re on the clock. This is part time, seasonal work, and if they can’t go two or three hours without access to their phone, they can work somewhere else. I’m paying them for their time. All of it. – Lee)
  • We don’t offer colored flocking, but I guess people can put food coloring in a spray bottle and lightly mist the flocking to make colors.  You can’t get deep colors that way, but I am told the pastels come out nicely. (We do offer glitter on the flocking. It’s my understanding that flocking is messy operation, so I’m pretty sure I’m going to look like the ugliest stripper in the San Antonio area. – Lee)
  • Speaking of flocking,  people like to touch it, and since it is paper it can get ruined that way.  So we are going to have a small demo, flocked tree for people and kids to touch and Do Not Touch signs for the others.  Since I didn’t know touching the flocking damaged it, I understand why it’s necessary, but I wish there was a friendlier way to say it than Do Not Touch.  Maybe I will come up with something. (How about “Touching This Stuff Ruins It. Why Do You Hate Christmas?” ? – Lee)

That’s some of the more generic things I learned, and since none of it is specific to their process, I felt comfortable sharing it.  I think the overwhelming message here is “Who knew selling Christmas Trees was this complicated?”

Camper Chronicles is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, a program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. We very much appreciate any purchase you make via our website links.  There is no additional cost to you and helps support our blog. Thank you.   Search Amazon.com here

 

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Some Thoughts on Social Media and Work

My head is pretty full this morning after a full day’s training session yesterday, it turns out selling Christmas trees is waaay more complicated than we knew, but before I start the next group of posts on this job, I feel like I need to take a moment, step back, and talk about some of the challenges about talking about work in social media.

There are many ways full-time RVers make money on the road, but it’s been tough for us to find a lot of specifics when researching the jobs prior to taking them.  For that reason, along with the fact that this blog it’s a journal about my life, I try to be as honest as I possibly can about these jobs we are taking.  But I do feel I need to balance my desire to share with respecting the rights of the employers I have. The employers are often family owned small businesses and have spent years building their brands.  They may also have proprietary processes and business models that deserve protection.  We ran into this a little while camp hosting, more while at the beet harvest, and I can see it will be much more with Christmas Trees.  My challenge will be to accurately represent the experience as a full timer who is trying to generate revenue on the road, while being fair to the folks on the other end of the equation.  This is not an easy balance.

It’s been suggested that I write about the experience and then wait until the end and post what happened, but after serious consideration I have rejected that approach for me.  Capturing what happens in the moment is important, and frankly I don’t trust myself not to go back and apply some revisionist history if I waited until the end.  Plus, if anything I write causes a concern I think the other people in the equation should have the opportunity to address it in real time.  So that leaves me with being extremely careful when it comes to anything negative.  The positives are generally easy.  Most everyone likes to hear good stuff about themselves, but talking about challenges in a constructive way can be…well, challenging.  I also draw the line about talking about anything purely personal when it comes to my employers or people I work with.  The only time I stray across that line is when people have interesting stories relating to the lifestyle and occasionally I share those in as generic a way as possible.   Most of the newer full timers don’t seem to care.  Many of them have blogs and are used to sharing their experiences, but I am meeting so many people who have been full-timing for 6 or more years who became full timers prior to all of this social media.  For example, I met this woman Kate who has been on the road since 2006  and she was talking about how when she started she would have to print her Google maps and use the printed copy to navigate.  I remember doing that for work trips, but until she mentioned it I truly had forgotten that we used to have to do that.

So where that leaves me is looking at every situation and trying to capture the experience without crossing my personal ethical lines.  It’s tough and Lee helps me by reading every post and providing me with a second opinion.  Of course he is all about the First Amendment so his lines aren’t always where mine are, but he’s also a really good guy and neither one of us is looking to hurt anyone here.  I write this blog first as a way to help me process all the changes in my life, and secondly to help others who may be going through the same things.  As I have said before, I write the blog I wish I could have read prior to becoming a full timer. What I didn’t understand when I started this is I can’t just throw up on the page.  If this was a personal journal that only I would read, sure, I could do that, but it is not.  There are real people on the other end of these stories and they will probably have feelings about what is written.

All of that being said, sometimes thing happen and I feel compelled to write about them.  I can’t let them go and need to find a way to put them down on the page.  Occasionally I write them out and then delete them myself.  Other times I have friends read them and get their reaction, and on a few occasions have deleted entire posts because I just couldn’t find a way to express what I was feeling in a way that would be understood.  Usually though, with help, I find a way to talk about challenging situations, but it’s not always easy for sure.  And sometimes I just flat out get it wrong. While at the beet harvest that happened and for the first time I think, I really understood what could happen.

We were pretty frustrated with some night shift members at the beet harvest and after one particularly bad day had a mini rant about the situation.  We didn’t use anyone’s name specifically, and nothing we wrote wasn’t true (heck we had pictures to prove our point), but one of the night shift team members found our blog, and shared it with others and needless to say several people were extremely unhappy.  Honestly it never in a million years occurred to me any of those kids would ever read my blog.  I have a pretty specific audience, and it’s mostly full timers, people who want to be full timers, or our family.  But the internet is an interesting thing and I came up in a random Google search and the kids started reading.  Lee’s initial take was “If it doesn’t apply to them, then they shouldn’t worry about it.”, but a couple of people were really upset.  So upset that they went to the managers, who then had to come to me and talk to me about my blog.  So picture this, I am standing in a piler yard, six hours into a 12 hour shift, and I get a “talking to” about what I wrote on social media.  Initially I was absolutely horrified.  The old “corporate-minded” me’s immediate response was to say “I’ll take it down immediately and I am so sorry.” But the new me, the somewhat free-spirited traveler me felt very differently.  For lack of a better way to explain, this blog has become my artistic expression. I have spent hundreds of hours pouring myself into these pages and it matters way more than I ever thought it would.  In that moment, for the first time in my life, something I had created mattered more to me than a job and I felt fiercely protective of it.

The strength of those feelings caught me completely off guard, but thankfully I have a lifetime of corporate experience in hiding emotions to fall back on.  I spent the next several hours processing beets, while simultaneously working through what I was feeling.  I called a fellow blogger and asked his advice, I talked to Lee, and I chewed on it.  Where was my line? Was this a hill I was willing to die on? What did it all matter? were a few of the many questions swirling around in my head.  My final decision had very little to do with the possible legal ramifications (although that was scary to consider), less to do with the financial repercussions than I thought, and was almost solely based on what I personally felt was the right thing to do in that particular situation. That may sound like a small thing, but for me it was not.  I spent many, many years making decisions based on what was legal and what would save/strengthen my job and protect my income which was necessary to provide for my family.  I just barely managed to hold the line ethically all those years, but I had to do many things that were personally distasteful to survive and thrive in a corporate environment.  For example, I spent two years completing efficiency studies and making recommendations on which employees should be fired. Those were not good years.  So here I was, again harvesting beets, and having an inner war between my old self and my new self.  Where I landed ultimately was we would remove the somewhat harsh language from that particular post, but everything else would stay. That was my line, and I was prepared for the first time in my life to be fired over it if necessary.

Thankfully, after some discussion, the employers accepted the compromise and we moved on.  Whether or not the business relationship was damaged beyond repair, I really have no way of knowing.  I do know that it marred the experience and certainly it probably put me in the category of an employee who had caused a problem, and I have a lifetime of experience not being that person.  So with that experience fresh in my mind, and entering a new work experience, I am feeling somewhat cautious.  I owe it to myself and all of you who read this to accurately portray the experience, but I absolutely don’t want to be in that situation again if it can be avoided.  I am a pretty middle of the road kind of person.  I don’t have big causes, I rarely get worked up over big picture things, and generally I have an optimistic view that given the opportunity people will do the right thing and everything will eventually work out OK.  It makes Lee crazy sometimes.  But I do care about this.  I think becoming a full timer is a major life decision and I believe people should have as much solid information as possible when making that decision.  I also know I in no way represent all of the myriad diversity this lifestyle offers.   We are simply one story, and one voice, but I do want that voice to be as truthful as possible.  I owe myself that and I owe you that.  Just please understand as you read this blog that I am living this life as I write about it and some things I will choose to keep private. Actually you probably all know that.  I think I am more giving myself permission than asking for it.

So why did I write this?  For two reasons.  First, it was a pretty significant event in my life and I write about those now.  I was going to completely skip this subject, but it ended up being one of those things I felt compelled to write about.  Secondly, just in case anyone is reading this and thinking this blog is 100% the objective truth on a subject,  it is not.  It is my personal perspective of events and it is not all inclusive of even my own experience.  I do leave things out.  Sometimes because they are not interesting or relevant, sometimes because I just can’t find the right way to say it, and often because it is simply my story to tell.  With work related posts, I also may not provide certain details because it is proprietary information.  I am sure this is similar to what most bloggers do, but I needed to say it out loud at least.

Update:  I did not receive the $250 bonus from the beet harvest.  Lee did, which is ironic, since his original comments were the ones that caused this whole thing to start. When I called Express Employment to find out why they stated their were no notes in the comments section.  When I asked if I was on a do not rehire list I was told that list would not be available until August.  So there was a price to be paid.  Less of one than I originally thought there would be, but $250 isn’t chump change.  Would I do it again.  Yes, with two exceptions.  I would not have published the specifics of the employee interaction and I would not have tagged Sidney Sugar on the posts until the job was complete.  Going forward this will be my tactic and although I am not crazy about not tagging the company upfront, this is my compromise to minimize the chances of something like this happening again.  Since we have our website on our rig, there is always a chance people will find these blogs of course, and for that reason I will need to be very generic when talking about the experience as it relates to other people. 

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First Time Camping on a Christmas Tree Lot

After a couple of longer than expected travel days we crossed into Texas.  We didn’t add state stickers on our map though for Wyoming or Colorado and I wanted to talk about that for just a minute.  Deciding when you will put a state sticker on your map is a VERY important decision.  Many people place the sticker when their wheel hits the state (and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that), but after we polled some people on the RV-Dreams Forum  (my favorite answer was “my dog has to poop in the state”) we decided that we would both have to see something specific to the state for it to count.  So since we blew through Wyoming and Colorado (we were tempted by Norad to count it, but we didn’t actually see it), no stickers this time.  Consequently, our map is a bit of a hodge podge and people may wonder how we got to certain places.  Anyway, like I said, everyone is different on this question, but when I claim a state, I like to have at least one specific memory I can associate with it. Oh, and we were also tempted to count it when we passed through Pubelo, Colorado. I was wracking my brain on why that sounded so familar when Lee reminded me most government publications came out of there when we were kids.  Remember the commercials “Write to PO Box…Pueblo, Colorado.”  I love it when we actually get to see a place that I have heard about my whole life.  Adds a certain zest to the experience.

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OK, back to the story.  We crossed into Texas and were headed straight to Amarillo.  We like this town and in particular we like The Big Texan restaurant which we both think is the best steak restaurant we have ever been to.  This is no small claim as we have eaten many steak dinners in many places over the years, but The Big Texan (who has their own herd of cows) is really, really good. The last time we came through here, we did all kinds of fun things, but this time it was just a steak dinner, a night in the Amarillo Ranch RV Park, and then on to Sweetwater.  We did have a chance to drop off our friends Deb and Steve’s Big Foot trackable in the geocache at the restaurant.  We “rescued” it in Alaska and since he had a hankering for international travel, thought a tourist destination was a good place to drop him off.  It may have been a good call, because while we were at the restaurant a huge group of Australian kids came in and five of them competed in the 72 oz steak challenge.  The way it works is you have one hour to eat a 72oz steak, salad, roll, 3 shrimp, and a potato, and you get the meal for free.  The steaks are BIG and it’s fun for the other diners to watch people try.  Those Aussie kids looked like serious competitors, and although we didn’t stay to see how it ended there’s a good chance at least one of them completed the challenge, and who knows, maybe one of them picked up Bigfoot on the way out.

That is one beautiful medium rare ribeye

That is one beautiful medium rare ribeye

 

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All the aussie kids were crowded around their group members that were giving it a try

 

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I hope the girl killed it

I would like to say here that if you have never been here, Texas is an RV friendly state.  There are RV parks in almost every city, the roads are straight and pretty well maintained, with lots of state rest areas, and the gas prices are generally some of the lowest in the US.  The weather is also warmer (it went from  overnight 40’s in Colorado to 86 in Texas in one day), and since there are lots of RV’s there are also lots of services. It’s not our home state, but I can understand why many people have made it theirs. Even though at first glance we may not feel comfortable (we are non-gun owning liberal Yankee democrats after all), we never feel that way.  My rule of thumb when traveling through here is don’t mess with Texas and everything will be fine.  I am sure those who live here would agree.

One of the many nice rest areas on the state highways

One of the many nice rest areas on the state highways

Lee snapped this pic of me looking out the window

Lee snapped this pic of me looking out the window

The next day we started at 9am and landed in Sweetwater, Texas at the Bar J Hitching Post RV about 3pm. On the way we passed through Abernathy and saw the cotton harvest in process.  I don’t think I have seen professional cotton growing this close up before, and took some time at a rest stop to walk over to a field and take a few pictures.  I am endlessly fascinated with the different crops grown in different parts of the country and after seeing close up what it takes to harvest and process the beet crop, was very curious about the machinery that harvests cotton.  There were huge bales of the stuff in several farms and it didn’t escape me that 150 years ago this process was completed by slaves and is now being done almost exclusively by machine.  Progress is not always a bad thing. Plus I have seen clothing with cotton from Abernathy, Texas so once again seeing where stuff comes from was cool.

The cotton fields looked a little like snow covered ground

The cotton fields looked a little like snow covered ground

Genuine cotton balls. Very cool

Genuine cotton balls. Very soft

By this time we were both getting really tired.  No real time off after the beet harvest combined with long travel days and another time zone change were taking their toll.  Plus, I was starting to get anxious about the Christmas Tree job.  When I first signed up, I was really focused on the work itself and the compensation.  The job sounded really fun, the money seemed fair, and the timing was perfect as we had a non-revenue generating hole in our schedule.  Add to that it was near where Cori and Greg would be and perfect!  What I never really thought about was the fact we would be staying in a parking lot for 2 months.  Now for many people this might not be a big deal.  Many people camp in parking lots frequently, but our first two experiences (Walmart and Cracker Barrel) were a mixed bag.  We disliked the experience enough that in two years we have only stayed overnight in parking lots three times.  Compare this to our friends Bill and Kelly (who frequently stay in Walmarts, Cracker Barrels, Moose Lodges, etc  on travel days) and we know we are definitely not the norm when it comes to this.  So here we are, the people who never stay in parking lots signing up to live in one for two months.  How did this happen?

Well, I blame Lee.  When I look for jobs for us, I generally focus on the particulars of the work and Lee looks more at living conditions.  He worries about 50 amp and hookups and all that stuff that really matters, but I tend to wave my hand and think it will all work out just fine.  Lee knows better.  So I am not sure now how the fact we would be living in a parking lot got past him. Yes, it’s necessary to complete the job assignment, and yes, we will have water and electric hookups, but still. Is it possible he’s mellowing? Can I no longer rely on him to be the voice of reason when I get these crazy ideas? In either case, I am nervous, and nothing short of getting there and seeing the setup is going to solve that problem.  At the core of this I think is I really need a few days of rest and I am not sure how restful (for us) a parking lot could be.  Time for some more personal growth, I suppose.  I hate that.

Well the only way to to find out was to get there, so after a night of mostly rain we drove towards New Braunfels.  We don’t mind driving in the rain, but as Lee said “It’s not pleasant”, still there is rain and there is rain.  Pretty early on the heavens opened up and it POURED.  Now Texas roads are nice and flat, but they also tend to flood in sudden rains, so pretty quickly we were driving on roads where the low areas had standing water on them.  You can’t hit those at 60 mph, so there was careful watching, changing lanes, and using flashers and slowing down in certain points.  It was pretty tiring for Lee, so I took over around 10:30am and drove until 1:00pm when we took a lunch break and switched back.  It wasn’t constant as the storms was moving east to west and we were traveling south, but that almost made it worse as it took forever to finally drive out of it.  Finally when we were close to our destination the sun broke through and we were excited about finally being on dry pavement.  The company we are working for was sent Greg to meet us at the lot to meet us and we had kept him updated as we traveled, but unfortunately he was delayed by an accident as well.  We couldn’t wait at out lot (I’ll explain why in a minutet), so we waited at a nearby truckstop, and of course right when he arrived, it started pouring.

Great.  Greg told us it was going to be a tight fit and now we were backing in in the rain.  Despite the conditions I was absolutely sure it would work out (my optimism had returned) and Greg and Lee not so much, but what choice did we have.  Our site it turns out is one of the newer ones (only it’s second year) and was on the outer edge of town.  It was next to a corner gas station, with a carwash, but the only way to get to the lot was drive the rig through the Shell parking lot and into the gravel lot next door.  Since the tent and the fencing was already up, it would require two 90 degree turns.  Will (and John, one of the fellow work kampers) jumped right out in the rain and I wisely decided to let them all handle it.  I grabbed an umbrella, and basically got out of their way.  I have quite a bit of experience backing Lee in at this point, but not in a situation like this.  Let me just show  you the pictures.

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What you can’t see is Lee had to make a 90 degree turn to get into this space between the fencing and the carwash

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Then another 90 degree turn to park in the back of the lot between the tent and the fence

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As you can see it was a very tight fit and took some finagling. The rain did slow down towards the end

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And here we are, uneven but in the fence

What’s really great is the rig is in the back of the lot which is on a residential street across from a fire station and next to that a piece of undeveloped grassland.   I was super relieved by the fire station presence.  Yes, we may get the occasional loud siren, but we weren’t surrounded on four sides by busy street.  Plus since our bedroom is in the back, instead of having the floodlights of the carwash in our bedroom window, we had the relatively dark lot next door.  Really felt lucky about both of those things.  I am going to post more pictures in the next post (these were taken with my camera under an umbrella in the rain while I was on the phone with my friend Kelly so frankly I am surprised they came out this good, but it’s enough to give you some idea.  The tent will be empty until November 15th when we start to get trees, and we have some camper re-positioning to do, but we are here and it’s much better than I thought it would be so far.  Awesome!

Oh and in a truly wonderful moment of travel serendipity, I got a text from my brother and he was in San Antonio for the weekend and wanted to know if I was free for lunch on Friday.  This is why I believe in a higher power, by the way.  We arrived on Thursday, start training on Saturday, and the only time I had free was Friday.  He had never been to San Antonio, had tagged along for an educational conference his wife Patrica was attending, and had no idea I would be in the area until my mom let him know we were going to be in the same place.  Eddie lives in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio and I haven’t seen him since we stopped in Columbus on our way to Alaska.  We met at the River Walk (super proud of myself for getting the monster truck in a downtown parking garage) and had a great time catching up. I love the Riverwalk  (wrote about it two years ago when we came here for Kay’s Air Force graduation) and we ate outside at one Mexican restaurant and then moved to a second to get the sopapillas I wanted for desert.  My brother did a lot of traveling when he was in his 20’s and even though he doesn’t read the blog has stayed somewhat up to date on what we are doing through my mom.  I was a little worried about what he would think about everything, but he was super supportive.  I was particularly touched when he said he was talking about me on the plane ride out to a guy sitting next to him, and the man (who was youngish but had just sort of retired), was incredibly jealous.  The guys said he totally got how appealing it would be to “chuck it all and just sell Christmas trees for awhile”.  Wow.  So here I am, feeling nervous about my choices, and God/the universe sends me some validation through some random guy my brother met on a plane.  Yep, I don’t believe in coincidence at all.

Love, love the Riverwalk

Love, love the Riverwalk

The boat tours are great, if you ever have a chance to come here.

The boat tours are great, if you ever have a chance to come here.

View from the first restaurant

View from the first restaurant

My baby brother

My “baby” brother

View from the second restaurant

View from the second restaurant

I got my sopapillas. It's the little things in life

I got my sopapillas. It’s the little things in life

Eddie and me

Eddie and me.  I look pretty good for a 50 year old chick that just finished a beet harvest!

It was a wonderful surprise and a much needed boost of affirmation from someone who has known me my whole life.  I’d love to say that I have everything figured out and I never have doubts, but that would simply not be the truth.  I have moments, especially when we are doing things that are none of our full timing friends have done before, let alone our long time friends and family when I think we have strayed too far outside the norm.  The reality is though we are creating our own normal.  It’s pretty exciting, since we get to make up the rules, but also sort of scary since we have no idea where our personal boundaries are until we run into them.  Thankfully we are doing this together and have absolutely fantastic support from our friends and family.  It’s humbling how much faith they have in us that it will all work out just fine.  Sometimes, I just need to remind myself of that.

Camper Chronicles is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, a program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. We very much appreciate any purchase you make via our website links.  There is no additional cost to you and helps support our blog. Thank you.   Search Amazon.com here

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October 2016 Budget

One of the best things about working 15 straight days is you don’t have much time to spend money.  Not surprisingly this was one of our best months ever with only $2881.88 in monthly expenses, saving $1191.87 off our monthly budget. It’s not hard to figure out why.  Minimal campground costs, low fuel costs and lack of entertainment costs helped to financially make this a great month for us. So if you are really struggling to stay on budget, work a ton of 12 hour days straight.  That should help 🙂

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Campground Fees – Only two days as we traveled to our next work kamping job.

Groceries – I am really happy with this category, because despite the fact that we purchased lots of prepared foods and didn’t cook many meals, overall we were $38 under budget. As you know this category has been a major challenge for us, so maybe eating canned soup and deli chicken every day is the way to keep these costs in line!

Dining Out – Despite the $119 overage in this category I am really happy with it.  $73 was one big splurge meal at the end to celebrate finishing the harvest and the rest was pretty reasonable.  It was a HUGE temptation to not eat out constantly since we were so tired and working, and if we had eaten every day at the food truck at the yard this would have been much worse.  Considering the circumstances, I think we did great here.  Plus it was offset by Entertainment where we spent a whopping $2.28. (I am pretty sure that was an ITunes song.  I love the show The Voice and occasionally just have to download a song from there. 

Truck Fuel – Individual fill ups were somewhat expensive in Montana, but there were few of them as all we did was drive back and forth to work every day. $178.20 is really a job expense in my mind, although after talking to our tax accountant, I don’t believe we can claim it on our taxes.  The most conservative view is going back and forth to a job from where the RV is parked is not deductible.  Traveling within the job work hours would be (ie: if we had been sent to another location during our work day), but a simple back and forth is not. I am not a tax accountant though and you may take another approach, but personally we tend to be pretty conservative on how we file.  I only mention it because I had some confusion on this issue, but of course talk to your accountant about your unique situation. 

Clothing – We spent $90.62 on last minute clothing items for the harvest.  This could have been avoided if we would have known in advance what clothing was needed, but since it was almost all thrift store I don’t feel bad.  I may have also slipped in a few recipe books as well, which really should go into entertainment, but I’m not going to break that all out. 

Home Repair – We crushed this category, coming in $134 under budget because again who has time for home repair when you are working 12 hour days.  I will say we have developed quite a list of items that need to be addressed, but have decided to use our extended warranty and address these items in bulk once we are in New Braunfels. 

Overall, it was a great budget month, which is another plus for working the beet harvest. What’s interesting to me is we have demonstrated we can live on less than $3K a month, but seem unable to consistently achieve that result.  Why is that so important?  Well if we can comfortably live on less, we can work less.  We are not alone in this struggle, by the way.  Most people don’t just flip a switch and instantly become frugal.  It obviously can be done of course, we met numerous kids who make their beet harvest money last for several months, what is still to be determined is whether we are willing to consistently do it. 

Camper Chronicles is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, a program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. We very much appreciate any purchase you make via our website links.  There is no additional cost to you and helps support our blog. Thank you.   Search Amazon.com here

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First Detour due to High Winds

We both tried to sleep in our first morning off, but all those days of 4am wake ups definitely had their impact.  Lee was up at 5am, and I laid in bed until 6am and then just gave up and got up. It was probably for the best though, because we needed to leave on Sunday in order to make it to San Antonio for our Christmas Tree job orientation and there was a ton to do. The first thing I did though before getting started was put my wedding ring back on.  This is by far the longest it has been off my finger in 27 years of marriage and it felt great having it back on.  With my rings on I thought I could face the extremely dirty RV.  One great thing about living in an RV is no matter how trashed the place is (and it was the worst it has ever been) it doesn’t take that long to clean it up.  I spent the morning working on the Beet Harvest summary post and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.  I felt so great once the floors were done that I just had to text my friend Linda and once most of it was done I had a nice long phone conversation with my friend Cori.  Her parents live near San Antonio and we were excited we were all going to get to see each other, but even more excited when I found out that our assignment was in the same town that her parents live in, and where they will be spending most of November and December. Nice!! (Since we get to hire our own help, I’m thinking about hiring Greg to dress up in a Christmas tree suit and stand on the sidewalk with a giant arrow spinning it around, and dancing and stuff. All business is show business. – Lee)

We also spent a couple of hours planning our route south.  Originally, I didn’t want to go through Denver, but there really wasn’t a better way that didn’t involve major detours.  Open campgrounds were somewhat of an issue (our furnace is still broken so boon docking is off the table until we have the time to get that fixed), so after exploring the options it turned out the simplest and easiest route was the main one.  For route planning we use Good Sam Trip Manager to create the route and then I use Ultimate Campgrounds (favorite resource for public campgrounds and BLM land), Passport America (favorite resource for half price one night stays), and All Stays (favorite resource for Walmarts, Cracker Barrels, etc that allow overnight stays) to find places to stop.  More often than you would think there are no decent places to stay (especially in off season) around the logical stopping points along the route and you either have to change the route or add days to the trip.  Since we have a pretty tight schedule adding days was out of the question, so it took awhile to find the right stopping points.  I really like the Good Sam format, but they don’t have all the places you can stay and what I wouldn’t give for one comprehensive source for information.

I exchanged texts with friends and family and caught up with people on social media.  I didn’t dive into reading blogs yet though, I’ll have lots of time in the truck for that over the next few days, but I did exchange some email correspondence that was work related with some folks. We are lucky to be living on the road at a time when there are so many ways to communicate with people, but once you get behind it’s a ton of work to get caught back up!  What I did not spend much time doing was resting, which surprised me.  I thought I would sort of collapse and sleep/rest all day, but we both had energy and a list of chores that needed done.  We did reach out to Jen and Kyle (the young couple we met before we started working) and had dinner with them.  We had all heard about the restaurant called South 40 , and decided to try it out. The restaurant wasn’t  that great (overpriced, with mediocre food and service), but we had a wonderful two hours with them.  They shared their night shift experience with us, and we really enjoyed getting to know them better.  Such a great young couple and a terrific example of how to happily live on less.   We called it an early evening though and once again we were in bed and asleep by 8:30pm.  Since we have a longish drive day tomorrow and early night was called for.

Sunday was travel day and we were both awake by 4am.  This wasn’t by design, but since we like to get an early start, probably for the best.  We finished up our packing up routine and were hitched up and on the road by 8am.  We spent another 45 minutes at the local Flying J gassing up and putting air in all the truck and trailer tires.  Every one of Lee’s four pressure gauges gives a different reading and it is driving him crazy.  He tried to find a place with a certified master gauge for comparison over the weekend, but was unsuccessful so it was “best guess”. Definitely something we will take care of in San Antonio. Anyway, we started out on 2 lane highway with miles and miles of grasslands.  We actually passed through the Thunder Basin National Grassland at one point and I have to say this is definitely not my favorite terrain.  As a beef lover, I appreciate the need for all of that grazing land, but as landscapes go it is pretty boring.

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As a way to kill time, I caught up on reading blogs.  I have a pretty strict rule with myself to actually pay attention to the scenery as we drive, but since I was so far behind and the scenery was so boring I broke that rule.  It was really wonderful getting caught up with everyone and there were so many great posts, but I thought I would mention two very informative ones here.  Jim and Barb did a post on adding an adult dog to their family while on the road that I thought was very interesting and Kelly wrote a fantastic recap of her summer work kamping in Alaska which is packed full of useful data.  If either of those topics is of interest to you I definitely recommend checking these posts out. While I was reading we passed into Wyoming and the road got quite a bit rougher for awhile.  It’s interesting to me how the same road can have so much variation from state to state.  I took a turn driving, and then eventually we ended up at the Douglas KOA.  We rarely stay at KOA’s, but as I mentioned our choice of campgrounds was pretty limited.  It turned out to be very nice though and I got to use my AARP discount for the very first time.  I saved $1.75 and at $35 the campground was on the high side, but practically empty.  We got into our extremely level spot, ate, watched some TV and went to bed.  We are both trying to stay up later and get back to normal patterns, but were both asleep by 8:30pm.

I did sleep in until 7:20am though and felt very well rested.  We took our time getting out and left pretty late (for us) at 9:30am.  Lee wasn’t concerned because it was only a 350 mile day and almost all of it was major highway, but less than 20 minutes into the trip we saw huge signs stating we needed to detour because of 65 plus mph winds on I-25 between Douglas and Cheyenne.  That was a first, and they didn’t actually provide an alternative route.  Cell coverage was poor, but thankfully I had my paper atlas to rely on.  When we first started doing this my friend Sue talked about how she marks her route on a paper atlas and I liked the idea.  I change marker colors every year and it shows what roads we have been on, so sometimes we can choose an alternate route we haven’t traveled.  Occasionally I mark some of the route, before we actually take it and I swear every time I do that something weird happens.  This time instead of a relatively simple drive down I-25 we had to travel about 120 miles out of our way on 2 lane highway.  The winds on these roads were high and had a severe impact on our gas mileage, (7.2 mpg as opposed to our normal 10mpg), and trucks stops (Outpost Truck Stop in Lusk, WY was pretty sketchy) were few and far between, but we made it to Cheyenne and got back on I-25 by 2:00pm.  I took most of driving that section and it wasn’t pleasant driving in those winds.  The truck and RV were pretty stable, but the tumbleweeds and other stuff blowing in front of us across the road did not make for relaxing driving.

One nice thing is as soon as we hit Colorado the scenery changed for the better.  There were mountains in the distance and it was really pretty.  The roads improved as well and thankfully we hit the outskirts of Denver by 3:30pm.  No one wants to drive through a major city in rush hour traffic with an RV and although we were cutting it close we were thought we might be OK.  We further hedged our bets by taking the outer belt E-470.  This was a toll road, but we drove on it anyway even though we didn’t have an EZpass of any kind.  We have run into this a couple of times and here is my take on this.  If the state does not provide an actual person for me to pay then they will just need to send me a bill which I will happily pay.  They have my license plate and from that can easily get my address, and it’s not my fault they have gone to an electronic system.  In particular this time I was really glad we made that choice because the traffic on the outer belt was very manageable, and once we went back on I-25 south of Denver it was much more congested.  At this point it was after 4pm and we still had to go to Colorado Springs and make it to the campground.

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Lee was pretty tired by this point, and although I offered to switch drivers again, he stuck it out.  We made it through Colorado Springs and off the freeway at 5:01pm, but then had to drive an additional 20 miles to the campground.  Not really sure how that happened. Generally we don’t pick campgrounds that far from the main roads on travel days, but it ended up being kind of cool, because we got to pass Cheyenne Mountain where NORAD is located.  We both remembered this location from the movie War Games and it was interesting being so close to it.  You can’t get anywhere near it (all roads say official business only), but it was still cool to be so close. (I was hoping to take some time in the morning and do a tour, but they stopped doing tours except for large groups of people who are in some way associated with their mission. Such a bummer. But here are some pictures I found online of the iconic tunnel entrance and the famous door. – Lee)

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Several more miles down the road we finally made it to Mountaindale Campground and Cabins.  This campground was pretty far out into the country and it was surrounded by beautiful hills.  There were deer wandering the campground freely and lots of RV’s in use.  Definitely not what we were expecting.  Turns out this campground is no longer affiliated with Good Sam and as of Nov 1st goes to seasonal folks only in the winter.  Thankfully she had a spot for us as we were exhausted and although I had sticker shock at the $53 per night fee, we paid it.  It’s an odd campground.  Lots of people living here year round (they had 17 kids for trick or treat night on the premises), but it still looks and feels like a campground.  The monthly rate is $495 plus electric which is reasonable, so again not quite sure why the daily rate was so high.  Still at this point it was 6pm and we were done in.  We were supposed to call our youngest daughter, but texted her and rescheduled because we were both so tired and there was no cell service anyway. (We can call using WiFi but that’s been hit or miss in the past, and I was in no mood to mess with unreliable technology. – Lee) . This day really illustrates why we like to leave early and arrive early at campgrounds, in order to have time to make adjustments.  Still, it was a beautiful place and very, very quiet.  It was the first campground I have stayed at without any road noise in a really long time.

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Pretty fat deer

 

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Sites were very nice and big

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There are mountain views

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We very much appreciate your support of our blog.

  • As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.  Search Amazon Here
  • You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
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Beet Harvest Work Kamping Overview

For those who aren’t interested in our daily descriptions of our beet harvest work kamping experience, we have provided an overview.  It is important to note that there can be significant variations from company to company, yard to yard, and even between the shifts.  In particular the remuneration will vary from harvest to harvest, depending on weather conditions.   If you are thinking about accepting a position, I would pay particular attention to whether “Stay Pay” is paid, and whether OT is time and a half or double time as these factors can significantly impact how much money you will make.  This post summarizes our experience working for Sidney Sugars, at Sugar Valley, on day shift, for the season of October 2016. I can guarantee you your mileage will vary. So let’s start with the numbers! If you would like to read the details of our experience you can start at this post.

# of days in Sidney: 39 – We were required to be here on the 19th, and we stayed until the end. At the very last minute they asked another team to stay one more day, but we aren’t counting that, because it only affected 3 or 4 people.

# of partial work days: 5 – These were days that we were asked to start late, or leave early due to weather.  We did not see anyone being asked to leave early due to equipment malfunction, instead those people were reassigned until the problem could be resolved.

# of non work days: 9 – These were days that we did not work at all.

# of full 12 hour work days: 20 – 16 of these were in a row, with no days off.   

Total Gross Income as a couple for the October 2016 season: $ 10,081.86
This does not include the bonus, which is NOT guaranteed. We were told on our first day that the bonus is completely at the discretion of the foreman. I doubt there’s anyone that doesn’t get it, but until it’s in the bank, it doesn’t exist. The bonus is 5% of the gross for the first year and 10% for subsequent years completed consecutively.  Our estimated bonus is around $500 total.  I will update this post at a later date to include the bonus if we receive it.  Update:  Lee received his $250 bonus and I eventually received $227.  At first glance, the gross is a lot of money, and we agree it is not insignificant, but let’s break that down a little bit.

  • Gross Income earned as a couple for only full days worked (22 days) : $7693.81 This does not include stay pay, partial days, or orientation.  
  • Gross Income earned as a couple per day for only full  days worked (22 days): $350 This was for a 12 hour day with two 15 minute breaks and a half hour lunch.  Some days (especially towards the end) we got longer breaks, but many days we received the minimum, and one particular day we didn’t even get the morning 15 minute break. $14.58 an hour
  • Gross Income earned per day as a couple for the entire length of the engagement: $ 227  People will have varying opinions on this, but we feel because we had to be here and there was very little we could do with our time off that this number is important.  Yes,  it does include getting paid for hours not worked, but even on those days one of us still had to get up at 4am to check the daily work status phone message. $9.46 an hour
  • Campground Savings:  This is also a very subjective number.  We budget $600 a month for campground fees and you can certainly add that into the overall revenue made. Since all of our work kamping jobs include a free campsite, I consider that a wash.  Lee doesn’t consider it at all because we could have boon docked for free somewhere.  There is also the fact that this is not a campground we would have ever paid for for more than a couple of nights if we were not required to stay here.  So your call whether or not to include it in your analysis as a benefit. 
  • Other fringe benefits:  We received four very nice free dinners at the yard and coffee was provided for free throughout the day. We also received two nice cooler bags as a parting gift. 

(We’re in disagreement on this. My position requires a lot less reading. We were there for 39 days, we grossed $ 10,081, which works out to $ 258 per day as a couple. – Lee)

Now that the numbers are complete, let’s talk about our experience.  As much as possible I am going to try to keep this summary to the facts as I understand them.  If you are more interested in the details and the emotional arc, I encourage you to check out the daily postings starting with  First Time at the Beet Harvest – Soft Opening.

  • Weather: The temperature, on day shift, was between 35 and 50 degrees. Beets are very fussy crops and cannot be harvested when it is too cold (sustained temps below 32 degrees) or too hot (sustained temps above 70 degrees).  We did work in some rain, but generally were sent home once the ground became extremely muddy because the trucks were not able to harvest.  We had snow once (were sent home), high winds twice (both times sent home), and never worked long in what I would consider pouring rain.  The key to dealing with the weather is the right clothing, and I have provided a recommended shopping list at the end of this post. (Here’s my take: start in the dark, end in the dark, only a few had sun or partial sun, so it was overcast and cold and windy all the time. It’s not hellish weather, but it’s not pleasant, either. – Lee) 

    We did see some amazing sunsets

    We did see some amazing sunsets

  • Physical Exertion: Almost everyone at some time or another picks up beets.  Many people pick up beets all day long.  They vary in size from very small to quite large and I routinely picked up beets weighing 10-15 pounds.  There is also a significant amount of walking in many positions (12,000 step days were not uncommon), and a significant amount of scraping.  As relatively young, somewhat out of shape people, we were very sore in the beginning, but nothing worse than several days worth of working out would cause (I lost 6.5 pounds and Lee lost 10 pounds).   It is also important to note that we were NEVER asked to do something that we physically could not do.  To the contrary we saw numerous people who were less physically fit being allowed to adjust the way they worked to accommodate.   All that being said, I would not recommend this work to anyone with a chronic medical condition.  The combination of weather and physical exertion definitely takes a cumulative toll.  (This was a much bigger deal for me. I have a back injury from 2004 that makes repeated bending over pretty painful, and all of the beets that need to be picked up are on the ground. One of the reasons I specifically wanted to be an operator was to avoid being in that position. After spending the season watching people do it, and having picked up some myself, there’s no way I could have done what they did, not even for a half day. – Lee) 

    A small beet and a big beet next to each other with a can for scale

    A very small beet and a very large beet next to each other with a can for scale

  • Work Pace:  Overall we processed an estimated 4500 trucks through our piler.  (For numbers junkies, a “regular” dump truck, like the green one on the left in the picture below, holds about 35,000 pounds (17.5 tons) of beets, and a long truck, like the one on the right, holds about 65,000 (32.5 tons) of beets. We think the distribution of trucks is about half and half, and when I was counting them, we were doing about 200 trucks on a full day. So our very rough estimate is 5000 tons a day, for a total of about 113,000 tons of beets on our Pilers during the entire season. – Lee) For most of the day, this involved processing a truck every 3-5 minutes.  We routinely had lines of 5 or more trucks waiting to dump and had very few periods where there were no trucks at all.  Our Piler was shut down for maintenance around 7 hours total for the 21 work days, but other Pilers were down significantly longer, which gave other teams additional breaks.  No one ever said work faster or harder, but a supervisor would generally appear whenever there was a slow down caused our line to get longer than usual. Also, the truck drivers just sitting in line waiting (sometimes up to an hour) brought some pressure to work faster.  If you are the type of person who can work at their own pace regardless of outside factors, this will be a non issue for you.  If, however, you respond to perceived need with an increase in pace, the constant line of trucks can be difficult. My best description of most days we worked (based on my having the latter personality type) was that the pace was often relentless.  Update: 2016 broke records for pounds of sugar beets harvested. Pretty common line of trucks(Those numbers above might be hard to wrap your brain around. They’re just numbers, after all. Here’s a better way to explain it. The picture below shows the piler yard from Google Earth, empty. Well, not completely empty. Let me orient you; the pilers are lined up on the right hand side, where they were at the beginning. And luckily, one of the pilers, #3, shows the very beginning of a pile. The sugar shack is the little white building on the left near the top. The little black dots are the light posts arranged in rows between the pile lanes. That’s also where the power connections are for the pilers. For scale, the little dots at the sugar shack are cars, and the thing below the 4th piler from the top is a long truck. Tractor plus 53′ trailer. The entire piling yard, from the edge of that small pile on the right, to the sugar shack on the left, is half a mile. – Lee)piler-yard

Here’s a picture of the pilers all lined up, rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise from the original. Again, that thing on the right of piler 4 is a tractor trailer. 

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And here’s a close up of the pile being started.This is what it looks like before the piler is moved back three feet for the first time.

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This is a picture of the piler yard taken with my drone the day after the last day of work. It’s rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise, so the sugar shack is at the bottom of the image, although you can’t see it, and you can see a long truck in the lower right. At this point, the second pile from the left is as far as it can go. Any farther back and the trucks couldn’t make the turn to get onto the ramps. And as you can see, pile 2 is a pretty good looking pile. I don’t count the top, because it had been groomed, but it’s relatively straight and consistent width. The “dimple” at the halfway point is something that happened overnight, no clue what happened there. As far as consistency goes, I think 1 is the best, but it’s also much narrower, they could only accept small trucks. 6 is also narrow. I think we did a great job on 2, and this picture doesn’t show that they took beets away several times to make more room. Then we spent a few days on 6 and then 3 days on 3. 

But anyway, the point of all these pictures is to illustrate, just on pile 2 alone, what 113,000 tons of beets looks like. 

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  • Quality of Work:  Again this is completely subjective, but overall I enjoyed the work. I was never bored and actually found many aspects of it quite challenging.  I have never worked in a “blue collar” position before and frankly had no idea how much thinking goes into this type of work.  Yes, there is repetition of process steps, but the unique nature of the trucks, drivers, team members, and pilers themselves causes enough variation that you really need to be able to think on your feet. More importantly, unlike a pink or white collar job, a mistake here could cause serious injury or death, so the work needed to be taken very seriously. 
  • Safety:  The company we worked for, the managers, and fellow employees took safety very seriously.  The only time I had serious concerns about my safety were after I witnessed a truck turn over.  That incident (where thankfully no one was hurt) really impressed on me how important it was to be safety conscious at all times.  Safety gear (hard hat, safety vest, ear protection, and eye protection) was provided by the company and I wore it at all times. img_3293

For those who are thinking about giving the harvest a try, here is my recommended shopping list.  These items should be purchased in advance as they may be costly or difficult to find locally. Many of these items can be sourced at thrift stores, but others may have to be purchased new.  I have listed them in what I feel is their order of importance. 

  • A very warm winter coat one size bigger than you normally wear to accommodate for the extra layers (I typically wore a T-shirt, long john top, flannel shirt, heavy fleece jacket, and top coat, and was cold all the time. – Lee) 
  • Head scarf/Face protection.  This can be multiple articles of clothing as the temperature does vary throughout the day.  Even on the “warmer days” I often wore face protection though to protect against the wind. (They provided at no charge very nice balaclavas. – Lee)
  • Brightly colored, waterproof, winter gloves (2 pair).  Gloves are provided, but they were not waterproof and not warm enough for me on most days.  The gloves should be a bright color because almost everyone directs truck drivers and they have a hard time seeing black gloves, especially early in the morning. (I wore two pairs of gloves all the time, and had two backup pairs in case they got wet. – Lee)
  • Thick rain coat and rain pants.  The cheap poncho versions ripped almost immediately, and although you may not have many rain days, you will thank me on the days it does rain.
  • All weather boots, calf high AND lighter weight work shoes (waterproof hiking boots work).  I absolutely recommend having two pairs of shoes so you can switch back and forth.  They should  both have Gel Insoles. (I took two pairs each day, thick heavy work boots for the morning and evening, which were warm, and regular hiking boots for during the day. Being on your feet for 12 hours, it really helps if you can change shoes a few times a day. – Lee) 
  • 8 pairs of calf high socks.  I wore mine doubled under the higher boots to help protect my calves from friction. I wore thicker socks with my hiking boots
  • 3 sets of long johns. I had one lighter weight set and two heavier sets and the cold necessitated wearing them every day except one.
  • 4 flannel shirts (I preferred the men’s version since they had more pockets) and the heavier the material the better
  • 4 tshirts.  Several days it got warm enough to only have a T-Shirt on mid-day and that shirt will get dirty.  You can either use old shirts you have or buy some cheap ones.
  • A big bottle of Advil. I took two – six of these a day and it made a huge difference.
  • Moisturizer/sun screen/lip balm.  Even if you have never used it in your life, buy moisturizer. The wind and cold take a toll on the parts of your face that are exposed and moisturizer made all the difference. If you don’t have a brand you use, I absolutely recommend Celestial by Lush.  It worked great for me.
  • Roll on Icy Hot was a godsend.
  • Heating Pad.  I used first thing in the morning and in the evenings to help with sore spots.
  • Thermos for hot soups for lunches.

So now we enter the completely subjective part of this blog post.  I am sure the big question on everyone’s mind is “Would you do it again?”. My answer is a qualified yes.  I liked the people and the work enough that I would return.  I felt the compensation was fair and can even live with the fact that every single season would be a different experience.  For me the major issue is the quality of life during this time period.  For 39 days we had almost no life outside of this job.  During the 15 straight work days in particular our life consisted of work, sleep, and approximately 3 hours of “free time” in which to accomplish everything else.  For the people who only work a few months a year to supplement their income this may not be such a big deal, but because we work most of the year, quality of life outside of work matters.  I gave up a well paying corporate job because I had “no life” outside of work and signing up for that again, even for a relatively short period of time, is a challenge for me. (I loved the work, but really didn’t like the fact that in the last couple of days we got moved from “our” piler and put on two others. I think if someone asked me to do it again, I would say it would be dependent on working the same piler for the entire time. The rest of it I could manage. – Lee) 

(Here are some additional things I wanted to include that should be considered. – Lee)

Things we didn’t really expect: very little time left after work and a decent amount of sleep, no time to make real meals or keep the house clean. Work, eat, sleep, laundry is all we did for 16 straight days.

Mail and other errands (oil change, banking, groceries) can be tricky with a 6-6 schedule.

Here are some nice things we didn’t expect: free coffee for the breaks, being able to park right at the piler, the porta johns were pretty close, and kept very clean, no micro managing, we could smoke any time and anywhere we wanted, the camp ground manager was VERY nice and helpful with getting our mail at 7pm or later. Surprise breaks, some of them pretty long, when the piler needed to be worked on. The work is not as brutal as we thought it would be, but a 12 hour day is still a 12 hour day. And a string of 7 or more of those takes a toll. 

Pizza hut and McDonalds right next door to our campground, although the McDonald’s didn’t open until 6am, so that didn’t help us with breakfast, which is probably a good thing, or we would have gotten breakfast every day.

Unbelievably friendly people in Sidney, MT.

Really affordable speeding tickets, if you have to get one. – Lee

So that’s our summary. We may feel differently after some time passes, but felt it was important to capture our thoughts as close to the assignment ending as possible.  For now,  I’ll leave you with some pictures that I couldn’t get a chance to put into other blog posts.

Piler 2 ...our favorite

Piler 2 …our favorite

Lee's labeling system for the control panel

Lee’s labeling system for the control panel

Me laying down for a minute while a loooong truck unloaded. IT was more comfortable than it looks

Me laying down for a minute while a loooong truck unloaded. It was more comfortable than it looks

The piler early in the morning

The piler early in the morning, with the full moon in the background

The folks we spent the most time with..Lee, me, Bridget, and Robert

The folks we spent the most time with..Lee, me, Bridget, and Robert. The pile is deceptive. It looks short, but it’s 20 feet tall. The bottom, where we are standing, is about 100 feet closer than the top.

Our favorite message left from night shift

Our favorite message left from night shift

Kissing a red beet for luck

Kissing a rare red beet for luck

Final time card...halleluiah

Final time card…hallelujah.  All the other ones were completely full.  This was a “short” week lol

 

Supporting our Blog

We very much appreciate your support of our blog.

  • As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.  Search Amazon Here
  • You can purchase the ebook telling the story of how we became full-time RVers.
  • You can purchase our recipe book filled with 80 recipes we have cooked in our RV and taste tested by Lee himself. You can purchase the kindle or paperback version on Amazon or buy the Apple version on Itunes.

 

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First Time at the Beet Harvest – Days 28 and 29… The Final Days

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Today was Lee’s worst day at work so far.  He woke up in pain for the first time, because Piler 6’s operator room was too small for him to pace.  He moves around a lot to help ease pressure on his back, but that just wasn’t possible in that small of a space.  Knowing what he was going through, I gave him his space and when we arrived at Sugar Valley we were told we would be on Piler 3.  Two of the crew members on 3 had left, so there was only one lady left.  She has been working the beet harvest for 11 years and we were told she was an expert at boom management.  Well, this should have been great since Lee is very conscientious about the boom, but it was dark and the woman uses very small hand signals.  Now, when working with an experienced crew, this probably works fine, but this was our first time on the piler except the brief break we gave them yesterday.  Lee was getting frustrated, and so was she, but unfortunately she speaks very little English and it was difficult to communicate.  From her perspective I’m sure everything was fine until us newbies showed up, but it was not a good way to start the morning.  I think we could have eventually worked it all out but then they sent the night kids over to Piler 2.  As you know, we have been working that Piler for almost all of time here, and so we were struggling on a new piler, while “ours” was being run by someone else. Playing musical pilers is particularly difficult for the operator since the setups are so different, and yes, I know, night crew switches pilers all the time, but they generally don’t have the additional pressure of an unending line of trucks they need to process quickly and efficiently.

Lee finally threw up his hands, went down and worked on the ground, and let Marvin (who had Piler 3 experience) and Robert operate.  (I had defnitely reached the point where I was about to start being less than professional, polite and respectful to people who didn’t really deserve that, so I decided to just step back and remove myself from the situation. It’s only beets, not rocket surgery. – Lee) And that’s how it stayed most of the day.  It’s important to note here that most Pilers have two operators and they often switch out to other positions.  Lee has worked 95% of the time though as the operator, and frankly he was due for a little break.  It did have us scrambling though to reorganize and the situation was not helped by the fact that both sides of Piler 3 had major issues.  I wasn’t planning on writing about this, but since they sent us over there I suppose it’s time to talk about it.  These Pilers are old (mostly from the 1970’s) and in various states of disrepair.  I get that.  I also freely admit I know nothing about fixing a Piler and cannot in any way speak to why the repairs haven’t been made.  What I do know is that some of the rubber seals on the left side of the piler were missing and the long one on the right side as well.  This resulted in spills so large on EVERY truck dump that we had at least one and often two bobcats standing by all day to help clean up the beets.

Piler #3 has a wider operating area and often two operators work in conjunction

Piler #3 has a wider operating area and often two operators work in conjunction.  You can see there is a missing flap and the beets are pouring out next to the truck

One of the "smaller" piles that the bobcat was cleaning up

One of the “smaller” piles that the bobcat was cleaning up.  This took several minutes on every load.

It was great we had bobcat help, but since the day before I couldn’t get a bobcat for love or money, the inefficiency of the setup was driving me crazy.  We would wait until the bobcat picked up what they could then walk up and pick up the few remaining beets.  It took forever, but we still processed 180 trucks.  The other positive thing about having a bobcat on site was it was super clean.  I loved that.   Eventually the scalehouse started telling the little trucks to stay away, which helped some.  The other thing I should mention is the impact of the spills.  I love dumping the trucks, it’s my favorite part of the job, but knowing nothing I did would stop a major spill took all the fun out of it.  That might not mean much, but if you are know in advance you are going to do terrible job on something, it’s hard to really care that much.  With major finagling, we might reduce a spill to 10 beets or so, but that was a rare occasion, and mostly involved the perfect match between the condition of the hopper and the design of the truck.

So Lee stayed on the ground and did the job I usually do.  We had 6 people so we did take 30 minute breaks three times, which was nice, but almost everyone was pretty cranky.  Lee in particular was bothered by the fact we weren’t on 2 and at the end of the day when we drove to clock out and he saw Piler 2 completely against the shack he was pretty upset.  (Imagine you worked really hard on something for two solid weeks, 12 hours a day, slowly progressing your way three feet at a time for half a mile, and at the last minute someone else came in and took it from you for the last 50 feet. Again, in the big picture, it’s only beets, but the difference between doing something really well, and doing something poorly is usually nothing more than motivation. It was bad enough that I didn’t get to finish the job, what made it was worse was that there was no reason our team wasn’t doing it, and we were right next door, watching. – Lee)  After he worked so hard on operating that piler I totally get it, and frankly it was not cool that it happened.  I know they have a business to run, truly I get that, but the returning crews on Pilers 1, 3, 4, and 5 never got moved around.  Yes, to some extent we were paying our dues, but they could have let us finish it off. And honestly it probably would have been fine if someone would have explained why.  This management team holds information very close to the vest, and although I understand that is to keep their options open, there has been several times when some explanation would have helped quite a bit.  Gen Xers like to know “why” .  We don’t need to have our way all the time, but we do like someone to explain to us what is happening. Once we know we generally dig in and get the work done.  Not knowing, however, makes us crazy and makes us feel like we are working for people not with people, which ultimately makes us less productive.  As the work kamper demographic gets younger, hopefully employers will adjust their management styles. For those who don’t buy into all of that, several scientific studies have been completed on the generational differences and I encourage you to check this out.  To be clear we have run into this problem in all of our work kamping jobs so far.  We are different than the retired work kampers that have come before us, and employers are not quite sure what to do with us at first.  I think this management team tried very hard, but the long days took their toll on them as well.

A couple of cool things came out of the day.  Lee did come back up top with me the last two hours and taught me how to operate.  If we ever came back we would definitely come as a husband/wife operating team and it was slow enough I got to practice.  The crew was great about it, helping me out and Robert wasn’t even upset when I almost dumped a load of dirt on his head!! Truly I had no idea how much was going on in that position.  You are managing two trucks in varying stages of the process, the boom in relation to the height of the beet pile and every 14 truckloads or so you have to move the whole thing back. Not to mention that the machinery you are operating could hurt or even kill someone. I am a great mutli-tasker and I REALLY had to pay attention.  We also got to see the “snow cat” grooming the piles.  We had heard that they sent a machine like the one they use to groom ski trails on top of the pilers and we got to see that happen over at Piler 2.  One of the supervisors said you really didn’t know how good of a job you had done, until they saw the top of the pile.  I would have loved to have heard some feedback on how we did, but unfortunately that didn’t happen.  Still it was cool to see it in action.

"Snow cat" grooming top of Pile 2

“Snow cat” grooming top of Pile 2

Friday, October 28, 2016

We both woke up pretty sore and somewhat dreading the last day. (Today was the first day since we’ve been here that I really wished I could take some pain medication. My back was screaming at me, and when it’s that bad first thing in the morning, it usually takes several hours to improve. Nothing specific to the past day or two caused it, it’s just a very old injury that I know how to manage, but if circumstances prevent me from being able to do the things I normally do to keep it from getting out of hand, then there’s a cumulative effect. – Lee) Then on the way to work Lee got pulled over for going 36 in a 25 in Sidney.  He hasn’t gotten a ticket in ten years and just accelerated a little too fast off the light.  The very nice woman police officer saw we were from out of town, took our information, and told us she was writing us a citation before she even checked his record.  We are both thinking $200 or more which would mean we were mostly working today for free, but she cut us a break and wrote it up for under 10 miles above the speed limit so it will only be $20.  I know right, $20, but it was super nice of her.  When we got to work we told some folks and tickets in Sidney and Fairview are pretty common.  Not speed traps or anything but the towns you have to drive through are 25mph and the road in between them is 65mph.  So it happens.  (I wasn’t even mad. I almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of it. I was tempted to say, “I’ll just give you forty. Twenty seems low to me.” Also, as I have always said to my kids, you aren’t paying that ticket for the time you go caught, you’re paying for all the times you didn’t get caught. – Lee) 

I asked one of the supervisors what piler we would be on and we were told Piler #3.  Communication was a lot better and we were making decent progress, even having a 30 minute and 20 minute break in the morning and then 45 minutes for lunch.  At 1:05 though, a strange thing happened.  They shut down the Piler and replaced the rubber strip on the right side.  This strip is what was causing all the spills on the right side and it took 1 hour and 10 minutes to fix.  Once again, I know nothing about fixing pilers, but the timing was…odd.  We were 5 hours away from the end of our last day and now they fix it?  Again, what do I know?  Maybe they didn’t have the part, or maybe there were other priorities, but I will say once it was fixed that side was great.  The first truck (driven by my favorite driver, Anita) no spills.  And later I went up and had 5 trucks in a row with no spills (7 was my previous record).  Things started going faster and despite the pretty cold weather, everyone’s mood improved and we even fit in another round of 30 minute breaks for everyone.

My favorite truck driver Anita

My favorite truck driver Anita

Then at 5:15pm a supervisor came over and Lee asked what happened at 6pm since the night shift no longer existed. Their last night ended on our morning and since we have had a line of trucks everyday at 6pm we weren’t sure what would happen.  We were told the scale house stopped taking trucks at 6pm, but when asked what happened with the ones on the yard we simply didn’t get an answer.  OK, so at that point we all assumed we were working until the trucks were gone and that hit everyone pretty hard.  Each truck was taking at least 5 minutes with the bad side still dumping huge piles and at 5:53pm we had two trucks on the pad and 6 additional ones in line.  5 minutes each was another 30 minutes of work and we still might get a couple more trucks between then and 6pm.  Bridget in particular was concerned because she had a dog she had to get home to.  The local camphost was walking the dogs twice a day, but there were so many dogs sometimes they got walked early.  We all were just standing there, processing trucks,  not really knowing what to do when the agriculturist showed up with a few people and said they would finish out our trucks. She said it was a pleasure working with me, I was pretty confused at this point and just said “Thanks, you too,” and then we went to our cars.  We walked into the shack and there was a pretty large group there and we asked who to turn our stuff into (hard hat, safety vest, and locks).  The bull dozer driver said he could take them and pointed to a container.  Then we saw some boxes with duffel bags or coolers that we knew others had gotten, took two cooolers and we were done.

The whole thing was very anti-climatic.  We said goodbye to a couple people, and then left.  As much as I appreciated them not making us work until past 6pm, it bothered me.  I didn’t expect a party or anything, but a handshake and sincere good job would have been nice.  Heck, if anyone had bothered to talk to us, we could have helped out by staying a little later.  Once again the lack of communication caused a problem where one really didn’t need to exist. Simply put, we worked 15 straight 12 hour days and we worked hard.  We came in 10-15 minutes early every day, piled a lot of beets, stayed all the way to the end as asked,  ( a lot of people left before the end) and generally had a positive attitude.  The last few days, however, I went from feeling like a valued team member to a just a cog in a machine.  Not a great feeling and to be honest it hurt my feelings a little bit.  Yes I know it’s a job and we got compensated for it, but a little extra appreciation goes a long way.  Anyways, our next steps are to get some sleep and finish our financial analyis.   Then we will be writing a summary, where I will try and  look at this experience as objectively as possible.  No promises on Lee’s thoughts! (I do not look at things objectively if I can possibly avoid it. It just makes no sense to me. – Lee)

For those of you who have followed along, thank you.  For those who took the time to comment, your support helped very much.  Having this format to express my feelings about this experience was incredibly important to me and no matter what we decide about returning in the future, I will never regret the experience, in no small part because I had the opportunity to share it with all of you.

One red beet in the pile

One red beet in the pile

 

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First Time at the Beet Harvest – Days 25 through 27

Monday, October 24, 2016

Today was by far the worst day we have had.  We knew it would be rough as we would be changing pilers, but none of us had any idea just how rough it would be.  We came in ready to start on #6 but were sent to Piler 2 (our “home”) until the sun came up.  I understand that call, as working on a new piler in the dark would have been tough, but in retrospect it may have been easier in the end.  Marie didn’t come in today.  Yesterday was rough, and I totally get it, but it was just the four of us until Marvin was sent over around 7am or so. At 9am, right when we start our round of breaks, our sample taker mechanism broke down, and we were told they were going to shut down our piler, and that we should go to Piler 6.  I asked if we could all have a 15 minute break to adjust our mindset and maybe have a little talk before we started, but we were told no, and to head down and get started, trucks were already lined up at Piler 6.  So down we went and walked into a new machine, new roles, and a line of trucks that had already been waiting. (Drivers who have been waiting, particularly at a machine that isn’t even running or manned are generally pretty cranky, on top of the cranky that comes from being on day 12 of this process. And I want to add here that in my opinion, this is just absolutely not OK. They have been telling us for days, to take longer breaks, and when it comes time to actually do that, they choose not to. This is exactly the sort of thing that causes accidents and ruins morale. – Lee) 

Now you might think all pilers are the same with perhaps minor differences (I know that is what I thought) but this was VERY different.  It was shorter in length and height, which means everything happens faster. The belt moved much faster, and the total travel swing from side to side on the boom was much shorter. The entire operations area was totally different.  (The best example I can give is getting into a completely new and unfamiliar car, and being told to drive it as though you were a professional driver, immediately. And faster. – Lee) Luckily Bridget and Marie had both worked on it before so we had some assistance, but Robert, Lee, and I were coming at it brand new.  What came next is not all that surprising, but even so I think we were all caught off guard.  Here we are this really strong team and we all struggled.  That would have been OK if there was any ramp up time at all, but the line was filled with Piler 6 regulars who were not happy with our inefficiency and not happy that their regular group was gone. (So add to everything else, every driver being crappy to us. It was super awesome. – Lee)  Again, I get it.  We have a great relationship with our truckers from 2 and knowing them and their trucks really helps speed things up.  More importantly, the roles were very different.  On Piler 2, two people  dumped the trucks, also cleaned up the beets, but here there was only one operator and one person dumping trucks and they were moving from one side to the other. That coupled with a very tall set of stairs made helping either one of them helping with dumps impractical.  Again, probably could have been compensated for, but we all had some really big dumps.  (What’s a big dump?  15 -40 beets on the platform, each one needing to be hand-picked up and thrown in the hopper).   The hopper was a different size, the angle is different, and worst of all you can’t see the tires from the new vantage point.  So we had large spill after large spill (where it was a rare occurrence on Piler 2). (And, the control center, instead of being in the open air, is in a cramped little closed booth where you can’t hear anything, your vision is obstructed, and much lower, so very difficult to see anything, or for drivers to see you. – Lee) 

Lee in the control center on Piler 6 with Robert on the side

Lee in the control center on Piler 6 with Robert on the side

We did have some bobcat help available for the first hour, which was great, but after that I picked up more beets from spills in the morning than I did on a whole day on Piler 6.  At least we had a third person, that is until they decided to open Piler 2 for a little while and took Marvin away from us.  This was particularly rough because we were in the middle of the lunch cycle and neither Robert nor Lee had gone to lunch yet.  Robert hadn’t been trained on the piler at all, and Lee barely knew it, so it was a matter of the blind, leading the blind, as we stumbled through lunch.  More delays which made the truckers less friendly, us more tired, which all led to more spills.  A pretty vicious circle.  I took a turn up top after lunches and finally I felt we were getting into a rhythm of sorts when Lee noticed something was very wrong with the boom.  Since day 1 we have been told to never raise it over 18 feet and suddenly it was set at 20.  This caused quite a bit of confusion and lost time to sorting it out, and bringing it back down and smoothing out the pile, but we learned about 20 minutes later a supervisor had set it at that height on purpose, and hadn’t bothered to tell anyone, and wanted it reset.  So up it went again, causing more delays.

Side of hopper with missing panel. This detritus was was about knee deep on me

Side of hopper with missing panel. This detritus was was about knee deep on me

The area where the sample takers stand. It was very different from Piler 2

The area where the sample takers stand. It was very different from Piler 2

There was a hole in the hopper and beets were constantly shooting out. I did get hit in the head, thank heavens for the hard hats

There was a hole in the hopper and beets were constantly shooting out. I did get hit in the head, thank heavens for the hard hats

After that things really seemed to break down.  Thankfully, we were all nice to each other and looked out for each other the best we could, but it was one problem after another.  We all made mistakes we rarely if ever have made before and I personally had two spills that crested the back of the hopper which I have never done.  The worst mistake was we only unloaded half a truck full of beets and the poor driver had to come back into line to finish dumping.  Despite our mistakes the attitude of the drivers actually got better.  We didn’t see the most impatient ones again, and our Piler 2 regulars who followed us, mixed with some 6 regulars who were patient enough to give us a chance to learn were very encouraging.  One truck driver actually got out of her truck and helped us clean up a huge spill, which I have never seen before.  The extra encouragement was great, but we were all exhausted by late afternoon.

Tyler stopped by and asked how we were doing and today the poor guy got more than he was expecting.  I walked him through the specifics of what had gone wrong during the day and explained that tomorrow we still wouldn’t be back to pre-move productivity levels.  You can’t change people’s roles and environments and not expect some productivity loss.  Ramp up time is needed no matter how dedicated or hard-working the people are.  I could be wrong about this, but I think the managers thought they could move us and we would pick up right where we left off.  And maybe if we weren’t all in our first year and three of us had only worked on one piler that may have been true.  Unfortunately it was not the case and really it shouldn’t have been that surprising to any of us.  It was hard though, and from my limited view the volume of trucks still seemed pretty high.  We keep hearing about how there is a steep drop-off in the number of trucks per day, but we haven’t seen it yet.  As a matter of fact in the last three days from 7am on we have not had one moment when trucks weren’t at the piler.  OK, I am done.  It’s 8:49pm and I have to go to bed.  The last thing I need is another day like today on little sleep.

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

I “slept in” this morning and didn’t get up until 4:30am.  I was too tired to take a shower and too tired to make my lunch.  My left wrist was so sore from picking up beets yesterday that I couldn’t even hold a cup of coffee in it.  I was standing in the kitchen feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of another day like yesterday and just started to cry. Lee walked up and just held me for a few minutes.  Then I took a deep breath, put on my wrist brace, and went to work.

Thankfully someone decided to put us back on Piler 2 and although it was just the four of us, (me, Lee, Robert, and Bridget) things went very well.  The volume was slower for one thing, and we all through common consensus slowed our pace.  Lee was the operator and covered one side and either Robert or I backed up trucks on the other.  We kept two on the ground most of the day so Bridget wouldn’t have to run back and forth and actually kept a nice pace without exhausting anyone.  It was also the last day for many of our favorite truckers as their harvests were complete.  Starting in the afternoon many came in with their last loads and it was bittersweet saying goodbye to them.  Two of the supervisors had their last days as well and we said goodbye to Tyler and Dave.  The people we have gotten to work with has really been one of the best parts of this experience.

Oh and in case you are worried I didn’t eat lunch, it’s OK.  I keep forgetting to mention that there is a small food truck at the job site and although we didn’t eat there earlier in the season the last three days we have taken advantage of the low-priced, home cooked meals.  Every day there is a different dinner special which is $8 and includes entree, drink, side, and desert.  They also have homemade sandwiches everyday and today I had the egg salad, chips, drink, and cookies for $6.  Can’t beat it really, although certainly from a budget perspective I am glad we saved eating there until the end.  It’s a nice option to have when you’ve run our of time or food and not only us, but the truckers take full advantage of it.  Since about 50% of our regulars finished today, we will see what tomorrow looks like.  I could use a slow day.

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

So obviously I have hit a wall that last couple of days.  It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t come back and do this, but it has slowed my enthusiasm down a bit. So in the interest of the full story let me tell you what I am tired of. These are in no particular order.

  • Being in dirty clothes
  • Being cold
  • Getting up at 4am (or earlier) and going to bed at 8pm
  • Being sore
  • Having a messy house (and usually I don’t care about that but the dirt everywhere is even getting to me).
  • Having “no life” outside of working the 12 hour days
  • Not having a sex life (the spirit is willing, but the body is not)
  • Not knowing what is going on with my friends and family.  I am barely keeping up with texts and looking at Facebook a little on breaks, but I have only the vaguest idea of what everyone is doing.  I did find a few minutes this morning to read Howard’s lovely tribute to the passing of his father, but that is the only blog post I have read.
  • The unrelenting pace of trucks at work.  We get to shut the piler off when there are no trucks and it has been many days since we had a few blessed moments of quiet.
  • Not having real dinners. We are eating, although I am less hungry than I expected, but it’s all prepared food.  I will say Lee has lost 10 pounds and I am below 130 (129.50 counts!!).  At least I get to say once when I was 50 I was below 130 pounds.
  • Picking up beets.  I know it’s the job, but wow, I am tired of that.
  • Not having any time to myself.  I am having social interactions every few minutes or so and although I like people, I could use some serious quiet time.
  • Always feeling behind.  The one thing I have somewhat managed to stay on top of is these blog posts, but everything else in my life I feel like I am behind on.
  • Not having a drink.  We aren’t big drinkers, but I would love to just have a beer or a glass of wine.  I am not throwing alcohol on top of all the rest of this.   For one thing it’s hard enough to stay hydrated and for another working a 12 hour day on a hangover of any kind sounds unbearable.
  • I’m tired of being tired.  Not just I need to take a nap tired, but bone weary. My stamina is so much greater than I though it would be.  Really, I have completely shocked myself because prior to this I wasn’t in that good of physical shape, but even the 20 year olds are showing the wear and tear.
  • Being here.  We both really like Sidney, Montana.  The people are great and seriously every interaction we have had with the townspeople has been a good one.  It’s a great community and they really rally behind the beet harvest.  I want new vistas, though, and a new place, and most of all I miss nature. We do see pretty spectacular sunrises every morning, but aside from that it is work, home, work, home.  One of the reasons I became a full-time RVer in the first place was to get away from that rat race.

All that being said, I know this is all for a limited time.  The main question remains is, is it worth it, and we won’t really know that until the final numbers come in.  I am really glad I did it at least once, for the challenge and experience if nothing else, just not sure how I feel about making this part of our annual routine.  There are definitely easier ways to make money, but perhaps not in this time frame. Like I said, we will need to wait and see.

y014

So we went into work and I am not sure if it was dumb luck, Bill, or God was watching out for us, but they had lots of extra people.  Bill put us on Piler 6 with 3 kids from night crew and after some fumbling in the morning, Bridget worked out a deal with them where our 4 and their 3 would switch every 2 hours.  It was fantastic.  We had two-hour long breaks and wow was that overdue.  If that sounds excessive, keep in mind our piler was only down for repair about 6 hours this season and others were down for days.  When your piler is down you get long breaks, but we never experienced that so in aggregate we were overdue.   Again, I loved it and walked away from the day with so much energy. I made a beef BBQ recipe I haven’t had the energy for, and even did the dishes.  Lee on the other hand not so good. He complained for the first time of his back hurting and he was super tired when we got home.  Those of you who have worked with him know he has two modes: on and off (but really still on, just thinking about other things).  He simply didn’t know what to do with the two hours and just wandered about aimlessly.  (A 12 hour of day of non-stop work is nothing to me. Ask me to take more of a break than I actually need, and I completely fall apart. It’s stupid, but it’s how I’ve been my entire life. – Lee) I, on the other hand sat quite contentedly in the car and read my book.  In the afternoon, Bill did ask us to give an extra break to Piler 3, which we did, and then he asked us if we could stay until Friday.  Since Bill has been so great to us, we said whatever you need, so Friday will be our last day.  We all would have been perfectly content to call today our last, but since 5 other people wanted to leave us well and we are the youngest in the original day crew, we decided to stay.  It’s just a couple more days, and personally I feel rejuvenated from today.  Lee, of course, not so much, but he really likes Bill and wants to make sure we leave on a good note.  Just to be clear, no one said anything about our bonus being affected.  Since we are all going to other jobs, that probably would have been a non-issue.  We’ve made it this far and we are just trying to do the right thing here.  Oh and if you have lost count we just completed our 14th straight 12 hour day.  Wow, I really didn’t know I had that in me.

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