Author: Jolene MacFadden

Semi-Retired former Full-Time RVer, published author, handcrafted bead and wire jewelry maker, who has started another side businesses helping self-publishing authors publish the books and marketing as well.

RVing Mysteries

March 28, 2016August 22, 2026 Jolene MacFadden

RVing mysteries seem to be on the rise. More and more young people are hitting the road in recreational vehicles but they still have to earn a living along the way. We decided to write a two-part blog post listing most of the stories we have found that were either writing about characters camping, traveling and/or living in RVs. The other article will be a listing of those writers we have found who actually travel in their RVs while writing and publishing their stores. We hope you enjoy this listing and will support these authors by buying and reading their stories and sharing them with your friends, family and fellow travelers.

We have a selection picked out that you can get by clicking on our Amazon Affiliate advertisement below or you can visit our AStore page and see all of them in one place. We really appreciate it if you decide to purchase any of these that you will use our links below or our Astore page as we get a couple of pennies on each purchase to help us keep our website going.

Busy Busy Here at Anastasia

March 3, 2016August 22, 2026 Jolene MacFadden

We have been so busy over the last couple of weeks and now we are down to less than 4 weeks remaining in our assignment here at Anastasia State Park. We have been having a pretty good time here and the weather, for the most part, has been quite nice. Between working in the campground, working here and there around the park, updating all our websites, getting our craft business ready for the Florida Folk Festival in May and trying to gather more material to write more articles for all my various blogs I haven’t had time to update this website.

We have also had some changes to the volunteer’s roster over the last two months with family emergencies and illnesses calling them home. Not much they could do about it but the volunteer coordinator here seems to have a long list of volunteers waiting to get in so she had replacements fairly quickly. Now we are getting ready for the big annual charity Poker Ride this coming weekend. Katie and I have volunteered our time to help out. Should be pretty interesting to have some of the bikers from Daytona Beach riding through. There will be music, games, and lots of food. We will have to take a some pictures and post them on our Facebook page.

Campground Host Experiences, Our eBook, Volunteer At A Florida State Park, Workamping, Working While RVing

Working Holidays as Park Hosts

January 22, 2016August 22, 2026 Jolene MacFadden

Working holidays as parks hosts or campground hosts in our Florida State Parks will take up quite a few of your required hours for the month. Not only do you have to get your regular duties done but you will more than likely get called in to set-up the park for any special events planned during the holiday, replace park staff that will be taking off for said holidays and there will probably be more people in the park during those holidays to deal with. It seems that almost every single Florida State Park that offers camping will be full during every single holiday that falls on a weekend. Of course, this generally corresponds to the kids getting out of school for the holidays. Mostly, you get local residents every weekend with a few out-of-state visitors as well. This includes Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, Independence Day and Memorial Day. As hot as it gets in Florida during May and July there will be lots of people camping in the state parks.

This will make your duties a little harder to get done but the mission of the parks is to encourage attendance as much as possible. It can be nice to talk to the different kinds of visitors, find out where they are from, ask the locals for recommendations of restaurants, stores and the like. You are one of the park’s ambassadors and as such you want to project a friendly and knowledgeable face so that they will keep coming back. We also try to talk to each of them about the benefits of volunteering. You can never have too many of those!

Campground Host Experiences, Holidays in the Parks, Volunteer At A Florida State Park, Volunteer at National Parks and Forest, Volunteer in Florida State Forests

Reading While Traveling

January 5, 2016August 22, 2026 Jolene MacFadden

Reading while traveling in your recreational vehicle and camping in some great campground is probably one of the top 5 past times when RVing. We just like to relax while we are camping and reading does that for us. We have found that most of our RVing pals do as well. So, for this blog post we decided to download some eBooks to our Kindle and see what is available that uses camping, RVing, and/or campgrounds as part of their story. To get started I read through some of the Full-Time RVing Facebook group pages to see if anyone has made any suggestions lately. From there I was able to go on Amazon and check out the titles recommended. A nice feature that Amazon has is that they give you recommendations based on your current searches as well as what others have bought when they purchased the books that you are looking at. My mom and I like murder mysteries. So most of our selections and recommendations will be in that area. We went ahead and added a new section to our Amazon Affiliate Page labeled RVing/Camping Fiction to get you started. We all have our favorite authors that we read but we thought it would be fun to gather a listing of those stories that we could relate to as RVers.

Read More “Reading While Traveling” »

Fun for RVers, Lessons in Camping

Anastasia Our First Two Weeks

December 10, 2015August 22, 2026 Jolene MacFadden

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.

Campground Host Experiences, RV and Campers, Volunteer At A Florida State Park, Workamping

Working Major Events as Park Hosts

November 21, 2015August 22, 2026 Jolene MacFadden

Working major events as park hosts can be really trying on your body and your required volunteer hours. Even if you are one of the volunteers just getting the park ready for the events you will end up using quite a bit of your hours. If you are working the event then even more because after the event you will more than likely be asked to help clean up afterwards. Residential Park Hosts as opposed to Campground Hosts are usually required to participate with park events. While we are at Dade Battlefield Historic State Park they had events almost every single month of various kinds and some were offered more frequently like a “Walk through the Park with the Park Ranger”. Since we don’t have any “Maintenance” skills we generally help out getting ready for the events, cleaning up after the events and sometimes we even demonstrated old time skills during the event or collected fees for the event. It was fun to learn about these types of things, demonstrate them to the visitors and dress up in costumes. If you are a history buff them volunteering at one of the historic parks may be just for you.

Campground Host Experiences, RV and Campers, Volunteer At A Florida State Park, Workamping