Anastasia Our First Two Weeks | Workamping in Florida

Anastasia our first two weeks as campground hosts has been a unique experience so far. Although we have loved almost every single one of our assignments so far, this one is just a bit different from the others. The park has a very large camping area with over 130 camping sites. They are divided into 4 sections with two loops each and a bathhouse in the middle of each of these two loops. The campground hosts are all in two Volunteer Villages. One has 5 spaces and is in the back of the back. The other one has 3 spots near the park’s administrative office and in the parking area of the St. Augustine Amphitheater. The last one has a single campsite set up on the other side of the park’s admin office by itself. You don’t have to deal with campers all through the night. These Admin Volunteer campsites have to put up with the visitors at the amphitheater when they have them which can get a little congested and sometimes loud when they have concerts. They also have a weekly Farmer’s Market that draws a fairly large crowd on Saturday mornings. That is nice though because you can just walk over and pick up some fresh fruits and vegetables each week. The main volunteer village area is by the back gate which gets a lot of local residential foot traffic every single day but is a locked gate. This area also has the Washer/Dryer house where the volunteers sign-up for days to wash our clothes. They are in excellent condition. There is a small library in the little shack as well.

These volunteers and the main volunteer village volunteers share campground host duties, 3 days on and 3 days off. For one month you are assigned two loops and one bathhouse. The following month you move over to the next two loops and bathhouse. Our first assignment is the “Tent Only” loops that have smaller sites that will fit a couple of tents, a pop-up camper or a Class B. That usually means that you have to clean a lot of fire pits and the bathhouse is well used. This state park has been booked solid every weekend and every holiday from the time we got here and are booked until the last two weeks of March. Which happens to be when we are leaving for our next assignment. We have been doing a lot of leaf blowing on the sites and the road every day we have worked here. The park doesn’t really want us to rake (which is good news to me) as the sites are beginning to “bowl out” with all the raking that was done before. They really need one of them street blowers here!

When you are on you have access to a golf cart that has buckets for trash and ash, a shovel, trash pickers and rakes. You have to hook up the golf cart each night to recharge the battery as well as your walkie talkie. Each morning you ride up to the ranger station for your leaving campsite listing and away you go. During your working hours you ride around in your golf cart checking on the empty sites, cleaning up the fire pits and pick up any left over debris. About once an hour you radio in your cleared sites. At about 1:00 pm you head over to the bathhouse and begin cleaning. Thankfully, here we are only responsible for about 30 to 35 sites and one bathhouse each day. Once you are done you dump your ashes and trash, replenish any needed supplies and head on back to your campsite. On the third day you collect the battery charges for the golf cart and Walkie talkie, clean up the golf cart and bring it to your campground host partner. As it happens we are in the main Volunteer Village and our campground host partner is in the Administrative Volunteer Village. So Mom hops into the car and follows me over. Generally, we head to one of the bathhouses for a much earned long hot shower afterwards.

Till next time……