It's time to WORK!

Surrounded by palm trees, we've set up house under the clear blue October sky in Wauchula, Florida.

We are at work. Yes. We landed our rig in Wauchula, slightly west of the center of Florida and 50 miles east of the city of Bradenton. We have set up shop as Workampers at the SKP Resort (SKP stands for Escapees, get it!) Jo works in the office for a day and a half on the weekends, checking in travelers, sorting mail, etc. I work Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. My job description is a pot-potpourri of doing a little electrical work (rebuilding circuit-breakers and plugs for the various sites), lawn mowing with a giant machine, pool water testing and helping incoming campers back their rigs onto the lots.

I work for the president of the co-op, a decent, mild-mannered fellow who hails from Michigan. Jo works for the office manager whom she replaces on the weekends.

We receive a small stipend for our work. But the best part is we get our site at no cost, along with free electricity and free laundromat.

This is a little village of 126 home sites. Some of the homes are mobile homes that don't more. Others are rigs like our's. A handful are ancient Greyhound buses from the '50s and '60s that have been converted to homes. I met up with the owner of one, his name is Swede, when I pulled the handle off my weed-whacker machine while struggling to get the motor to start. Swede was puttering in the workshop when I brought it in for fixing and he drove with me to his lot and rummaged in the basement of his 1956 Greyhound bus. He still drives the bus down from the north each year, although he says it's getting harder to do this as he and the bus get up in years. He eventually came up with a temporary solution to the weed-whacker by tying the pull-string onto a nail and then taping the nail to the plastic handle.

Down the road, next to the office, there's a couple who have a pair of skis screwed to the wall of their mobile home. He spends his day in the glassed-in Florida room keeping a checklist of who comes and goes. Why does he do this? No one seems to know. He just likes keeping tabs on everyone. He doesn't give the notes to anyone. Just sits there all day long, noting who comes in and who goes out of the resort.

Over in the back area of the park, we have two Sand-hill Cranes who commute in each autumn and spend the winter here. Last year, they gave birth to two chicks so it's going to be interesting to see whether they return from the north with their chicks this year. No sign of them yet.

We have three great-horned owls that hang out on the power poles and swoop silently in the night to capture their prey.

As one of our first projects in our new location, I have redesigned the front area of our rig, under the dash. We eliminated our old cathode tube TV a couple of years back, but found the new LCD TV, while thin and elegant, was thin on sound. So I installed a new sound system under the set, adding awesome bass and increased volume. The cats were thrilled by opening the hole behind the TV set and they took the opportunity to explore this great cavity before it was filled in with my new sound system.