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Well, it seems to happen the same way every year. We get past the holidays and into January and suddenly our winter work stint is halfway over and thoughts about our summer plans start to churn. When we ended our incredible summer travels late last fall and headed to Florida for a bit of "back to real life on the grid" we were of a mind to not travel extensively during the summer of 2015. We'd talked about staying on the east coast, tooling around our old haunts in New England and then perhaps a jaunt up to Maine and coastal Canada or to head toward the Great Lakes. But as the need to solidify summer plans started to burn and we started to poke around at some options, a summer in Yellowstone, the first park in the National Park system, seemed to jump off the page at us.
It came together very quickly - shockingly so. Last weekend we had barely begun to think about our summer travels. Today we have a contract with a park concessionaire to live and work at Lake Yellowstone, working for Yellowstone General Stores in the Southern section of the park! We will be living and working in Grant Village, on the shores of Lake Yellowstone in the southern half of the park (see below) from early June to early September.
Many retired full time RVers work for park concessionaires, taking gigs in one park after another as a way to experience the beauty and awe of these natural wonders, while becoming part of a park community and making enough money to fund their travels for another few months. The pay is minimal - but it usually includes some kind of housing (paid RV site, dorm housing or other type of subsidized accommodations), store discounts, sometimes a food plan and often special deals with park outfitters, etc. It will be the first time we work in a National Park, rather than volunteer, and it's something we've wanted to try for a while.
Now it seems we are about to do it! We'll share more details as we have them. For now, we just wanted to share the excitement....
