SSSHHH......Can You Hear That?

Seriously, be quiet and put your ear next to the computer. There. Can you hear it now? No? Let me tell you what you are not hearing then. It is the sound of our souls being sucked out. Picture Harry Potter by the lake with a dementor above him sucking out his soul. That's what it is like for us anyways.

Yes, I am being over dramatic. It isn't that bad. But it sure feels like it.

Why? Why would you put yourself through that? Let me explain.

Picture if you will, a pie. A succulent, steaming apple pie. Cut that pie into 8 pieces. Each year you take a piece of that pie and eventually in eight years it will be gone. (The last piece may be a bit nasty also). So to make our pie last longer, we take an occasional job so that the piece of pie we take this year will be smaller. (Yes, Lisa, I am talking about money.)

Unfortunately life still costs money. (We own a Jeep now and those that own one know what I am talking about) We are working more and traveling less. But we are still traveling. We are trying to find jobs like our Yellowstone job in areas of the country we want to explore. This job in Kentucky pays well and they even give you a free place to live while you are here. That is why we decided to come back again and put ourselves through this.

We are making the best of it. We visit Lee's Special Recipe Fried Chicken every other week. If you are in the south, go to Lee's. It is so much better than KFC. (Is that sad that that is the high-light of our weeks?)  We have checked out a lot of the sites in this area.

We visited Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace.

Cumberland Falls State Park.

Cumberland Gap.

Natural Bridge Kentucky. We went with Peg and Michele. It was very interesting because you take a chairlift up to the top. Then take a short walk through the beautiful Kentucky woods.

The Patton Museum and Fort Knox.

So our time here has not been wasted. There are a few more sites that we want to see. Next week is Thanksgiving and that means that we will start working 50 hour weeks. Which means that we will be more tired and less likely to sightsee.  So hang onto your seats. LSEP.

A Day in the Life

BEEEEEEEP, BEEEEEEEP, BEEEEEEEP, BEEEEEEEP! Oh crap! It's 5:10 in the A.M.! How can that be? It was just 9:00 P.M.

That is how our day starts. The sun does not slowly rise over the horizon, bathing the earth in a warm glow. Birds don't just start chirping a chorus of "Wake up sleepy heads". No, this is not a fairytale. In reality I roll over, slap the alarm off, wipe the drool from the corner of my month and get up out of our nice cozy bed and turn on the coffee pot. The cat's just gave us the stink eye, wondering why anyone would get up at this hour.

Our shift starts at 6:30 in the morning. We require 2 cups of coffee to start functioning at any productive level.

This is what it is like.

We enjoy our two cups, get the other things done that need doing. We trudge out of our RV at 6:10 to walk down the hill to our job. Our high visibility vests reflecting in the street lights as we dodge the Kentucky drivers racing down the street. No sidewalks here. "Car!" We keep telling each other and then we squeeze over to the side of the road. Stay out of the grass. Who knows how many doggy land mines are lying in wait to just smother your shoe in chocolaty goodness. 

We go through the turnstiles, make 3-4 attempts at opening our locker, then say "screw it"  and just hang up our jackets and put away our lunches. 

6:25 we punch in. Grab a scanner and head over to the start up. Stretch, get told any important information we need to start our day and by 6:35 we are picking.

6:36 pick. 6:37 pick. 6:38 pick. 6;39 pick. On and on until 9:00 A.M. Breaktime! Depending on where you are in the warehouse, the walk to the break room can take you anywhere from 2-3 minutes,  up to 5 minutes. Serious, you can get 5 minutes away and at the end of the day that walk gets to be very long. You finally get to the break room, sit down with a beverage and look up at the clock. Damn! it is 9:15. I just sat down.

9:15 we log into our scanner to see where in the warehouse we have to go to start again. 

9:16 pick, 9:17 pick, 9:18 pick. 9:19 pick. So on and on it goes. 11:25 is never going to get here. Then all of a sudden it is lunch time. You didn't notice because your brain has gone numb. Again you start to head to the break room. Grab your lunch and jostle your way to a microwave. "Excuse me, excuse me". You wait your turn to finally get a microwave. However the person before you had their lunch blow up in it or you wait there because there is still time on it. So after a few moments you open it to find it empty and the person before you just never cleared it. 

11:55 line up at the time clock and punch back in. Grab your scanner and head to the startup area to stretch again and start the second half  of the day.

12:00 pick, 12:01 pick, 12:02 pick, 12:03 pick. Your body goes into auto mode. Look at the scanner, go to the location, scan the bin, look for the item you need, scan the item, look for the next location and the cycle just repeats itself over and over. Literally a couple hundred times a day. I have been picking at about 180 to 250 items in a session. So that could be 720 to 1000 items a day. Or as they want us to say instead of items, smiles.

2:30 break time! Back to the front of the building. Sit for 15 minutes and then back to the scanner. 

2:45 pick, 2:46 pick, 2:47 pick, 2:48 pick. Your mind starts to wander, when you scan an item(smile), if it is correct it lets you know with a single beep. If it is wrong it goes BEE BOOP, BEE BOOP.  I don't speak scanner but if I did I think that it is saying "F@#K YOU, F@#K YOU". Finally you look at the clock. Can it be?

5:00. Let the stampede begin. Mooooo, Moooo. One more 10 hour day finished. Trudge up the hill and fall into your recliner. Dinner and a little TV and then it is time to shower and go to bed to start it all over.

So that is it. The life of the rich and famous. Not. LSEP

Going to My Happy Place

We finished our first 40 hour week here and I am trying so very hard to stay positive. I knew what we were getting ourselves into since we did this job last year. I knew about all of the obstacles in our way. All of the little games that stowers play on us. 

But as much as I try to not let it get to me it does. Not as bad as it was last year when we left, but it is early.

The biggest thing that gets to me is the way that they think this should be done. I can not believe that this is result of all of their brainstorming. What I am referring to is the way that they have us picking items in the warehouse. And I will give you plenty of examples so that you know what I mean.

Example #1- You get to a bin that is packed full of black wallets. You think easy, right. Well no. There is one brown wallet in there somewhere and that is the one you need. This does not happen by accident. A stower had to put one brown wallet in there. Usually it is in the back and on the bottom. So a pick that should take a couple of seconds now takes minutes. Chances are that next to that bin is a bin full of brown wallets with one black one in there.

Example #2- You get to a bin with items all wrapped in white plastic bags with Chinese writing on them. They are all different items mind you. So all you have to go on is the number on the upc code. How efficient is that? Now you just start scanning everything hoping to find the right item.

Example #3- You get to a bin and you look at your scanner to see what you are looking for. It gives you a lengthy description but fails to tell you a size or color. So again you just start scanning everything. If the item you are scanning is correct it beeps once. If it is wrong it has this series of beeps to let you know it is wrong.

Example #4- The scanner sends you to the 4th floor of a pick mod and you pick one item. It then sends you to the ground floor in a different warehouse to pick one item. It then sends you back to the 4th floor you were just on to pick one item again. Frustrating, right?

Example #5- You get to a bin and it is so full of stuff, you can barely get it open. You hunt for the item you need, find it and then try to close the bin. The stower that filled that bin, stuffed it that full on purpose. It did not get that way on it's own.

I could go on and on. Now I am sure you are thinking that it is not that bad. It's not, if it happened occasionally. But it happens all day long. 10 hours a day. 

So all you can do is think happy thoughts. The only thing that gets me through this is the love of a good woman and a case of cold beer at the end of the week. lsep. 

Suddenly it Hit Me

Did Lisa finally slap the daylights out of me? Did you get rear ended by Bubba the hill-billy?

Nope, none of the above. Although I think Lisa would like to sometimes. What hit me is that driving around Kentucky, I realized that it is really a beautiful state. I know we were here last year but we just kind of stayed in the western part of the state.

Last Saturday we went to Abraham Lincoln's Birthplace in Hodgenville Ky. It was just a short drive away and I remember seeing the signs for it last year. But we never made the effort to check it out. I always find it amazing to be able to walk where giants have walked. To learn a little more history of our forefathers. To see the humble beginnings of one of our greatest presidents.

This is a small national historic park and it is also a no fee park. We drove in and went to the visitor center. Abraham Lincoln only lived her a couple of years and then his family moved a little farther north after being evicted over a land dispute. His log cabin that he was born in is here inside a beautiful shrine.

We then drove into Hodgenville because they had an Abraham Lincoln museum. It was privately owned and a little cheesy but the price of $3.00 each to get in was okay. They had lots of diorama's of Abe's life. Also a ton of oil paintings and a lot of those were just awful. 

Lisa listening to the Gettysburg address

All in all it was very interesting. So that was last Saturday. We then worked Sunday and Monday with Tues-Thur. off. 3 day weekends are nice. We picked out some sights that we want to see this time while we are here starting with the one that was going to be the farthest away. We figured that later on our energy levels would be less so we did this one first. The sight that we picked was the Cumberland Gap.

Cumberland Gap is on the eastern side of the state. It borders Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. We drove the scenic route through the Daniel Boone National Forest. It was so wooded that I could just picture Daniel Boone or Davey Crockett walking through these woods. We stopped at the Cumberland Falls for some pictures.

Upstream

The Falls

Downstream

The river is very shallow and the bottom is all rock, not mud of even the kind of rocks you would find in mountain stream. It just flows over a rock layer that it can't get through.

The Cumberland Gap. I remember this from history classes in school a long time ago. I don't even know if it is taught anymore. The gap is exactly that. An area in the mountain range that was the easiest place to cross. They estimate that 200,000 to 300,000 pioneers crossed through there. Native Americans have been using the gap for centuries following animal herds.

The gap goes from where we are standing to the other mountain across the way

The pathway. It was a perfect day.

The gap from the Tennessee side

Of course during the Civil war this area was very important to both sides. So I got some good cannon photos. I love to look at cannon's.

It was a very good day. On a more personal note. One of my cousins passed away last week, which got me thinking about this lifestyle of ours. We feel very lucky to be able to do this and very fortunate. My cousin was 60. He was diagnosed with cancer a couple of weeks ago and it took him that quickly. He reminded me that we need to make that extra effort to see as much as we can because you never know. Lsep.

So it Begins..................Again

After a sad good-bye to Lisa's mom, our son Roman and other friends, we closed up the fifthwheel, hooked up and hit the dusty road south. Our trip from Minnesota to Kentucky was uneventful. The only thing worth mentioning was that we both decided that that trip was really long. 1100 miles. Maybe it was because we have been driving a lot of miles lately. We made the trip from Yellowstone to Minnesota in July to pick up our new home and then back to Yellowstone with it. 800 miles each way. Then we finished work in Yellowstone and drove back to Minnesota(another 800 miles). So we are okay with sitting for awhile.

We pulled into the Heartland Campground here in Campbellsville KY. Not that many sites left so we were lucky to get one since they don't take reservations. It seems like there are a lot more people here this year or maybe it was because we started a month later than last year. It just feels different.

Lisa just told me why it is busier. Our employer has 4 warehouses that hire workampers. They closed one last year to workampers, so those people are here.

Monday we had our orientation. Same as last years. Company history, sexual harassment training, equal opportunity training and something completely new. I can not believe that America has gotten to this point but it has. We had a new video about "Work Place Violence". What to do in case a person enters the facility and starts shooting. Option one: RUN. If you can't run, option two: HIDE. And if all else fails, option three: FIGHT. Sadly they have taken away option four: SHOOT BACK! Which should be option one. Ironically the video opens up with the shooter shooting the unarmed security guard. Then a dozen other people. We don't even trust our security people with guns.

Then we had safety school. How to push a cart, climb a ladder and move a pallet. Really good stuff.

Tuesday we learned how to do our jobs. Actually it came back to us pretty fast. In fact it was just like we never left. A few people remember us and us them. There is lots of turnover in a company like this.

The rest of our week will be 5 hour days to get used to it and then we jump right in to our schedule of 10 hour days, 4 days a week. So hopefully there will be something interesting to blog about. We will see. And if you don't know what I am talking about, look back a year in my blog to learn about where we are. lsep

Where do we come from?

Since we are lying kind of low at the moment. I thought I would share where we come from since we have met so many new people this summer. I have also noticed that a lot of RV'ers with the state maps on the sides of their RV's don't have Minnesota and North Dakota on them.

We come from the land of 10,000 lakes. And yes, I do believe there are 10,000 lakes here. Our town we claim as home now is Fergus Falls. A little dot in West Central Minnesota. Minnesotans say that there are 2 Minnesota's. You have the 6 county area around Minneapolis/St. Paul and then you have everything else. I am glad that we come from the second part.

Fergus Falls biggest claim to fame is that it was home to Minnesota's third state hospital for the insane. A real insane asylum.

 This place is huge and abandoned now. Ghost Hunters have gone in there and have found evidence that it is still haunted. It opened in 1890 and closed in 2005. 

This is what it looks like today. Walking around the grounds was a little spooky. I felt like I was being watched. The doors are all locked and the windows that are broken are boarded up. I guess they do ghost tours around Halloween and I would like to some day go in there and get the crap scared out of me. 

Fergus Falls sits in Otter Tail County. So they have a giant otter in the park.

Driving around the area you will see many lakes and rivers.

This time of year the harvest is in full swing. The leaves are starting to change. We have sumac that turns a deep vibrant blood red.

The maple trees turn a beautiful orange. But I didn't get a photo of one. Small town churches are everywhere. This area is heavily populated by Scandinavians who are primarily Lutheran.

Wherever there isn't a lake, there's farmland. These farmers needed to get their crops to market. So grinding mills sprung up everywhere at the turn of the century. At one point there were 1,000 mills in the state. Near Fergus Falls we have Phelps Mill. It no longer works but it has been restored and is a very interesting stop.

The machinery for grinding the wheat into flour is still inside. 

We do get all four seasons here. Each has its own special attributes. It sounds so perfect. I can hear you all saying that now. Why would we want to leave? Here's why.

The winters are brutal. Below zero temps weeks at a time. Snow and wind. You are stuck inside your house for months. You get so cold that your back hurts because your muscles are so tense. That snow plow was the best purchase I have ever made. I sure became popular in the neighborhood.

So when all my Florida friends get all giddy about some snow, this is what I think about and it makes me shiver.

That's it folks. It is getting cool here so that means that it is time to start heading south.

Final Thoughts on Yellowstone

Well we did it! We finished our commitment in Yellowstone National Park. So now I would like to give you my two cents worth on the whole ordeal. So take it for what its worth.

The Park:

What can I say, the park is beautiful. We are very lucky to be able to have lived inside a national park for 3 months. Some areas are over crowded like Old Faithful and Norris, but where we were, it was less crowded. Sure there were people, after all it was the 100th anniversary of the park service this year. Last year they had 4.4 million visitors. They expected to exceed that number this year. We had plenty of animal sightings. Bears, badgers, elk, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, antelope, fox, coyotes and of course hundreds of stupid bison.

The Job:

Tower Fall general store.

This told the history of the building

From a workamping aspect, the job was okay. This company we worked for is Delaware North. they run the general stores in the park. Our salary was $8.25 an hour. Not high by any means, but it was okay. They also charge you for your camp site. $16.00 a person per week. They also charge for your electricity. They may attract more work campers if they got rid of the lot rent. The job itself is not hard. We were cashiers. After the newness wore off it was petty tedious.

The area of the park that we were at is very isolated. No TV, radio and the cell service was very poor at best. We would probably choose a different part of the park to work in next time. But some people like the isolation. The living with bears as neighbors.

The people:

The best part of this lifestyle is that we meet so many nice and friendly people. Yellowstone was no exception. Everyone pulled together and did more than what was asked of us because from the very beginning we were short handed. The slackers were weeded out early. There were injuries and family emergencies that people had to leave for. What really impressed me was the young people that worked in our store. We had a group of Taiwanese students who we referred to as the "kids", and one young woman from Idaho. They were all so hard working and had amazing attitudes. It was very interesting to learn about Taiwan.

Lisa and Emily

Jesse and Teresa

Karen and Lori

Stuart, Snow and Wendy

Bree

Sue and Chuck

Trish(a.k.a. the dish) and Larry

Grace and Vass

Teresa, Jesse, Wendy and Emily saying goodbye to Moose

Wayne and Edwina

I have to apologize for not getting every ones picture before we left. There where more people than this, but these are the ones we ended up working the most with. I wanted to share this also. The Taiwanese kids come here to work without cars. So to explore the park they either have to sign up for tours or hitchhike. At night we don't like to let them walk up the hill to the dorms because of the bears. So one night we gave 5 kids a ride home in our Jeep. That was 7 people stuffed inside our little Jeep. Everyone had fun squeezing in there.

So all in all it was a very good experience for us. We would do it again when we happen to be out west sometime in the future.