We know nothing about Camp Hosting, as we arrive, but we’re always willing to try! We arrive, set up, and go into the nearest town called Munisings, MI, just to check it out and make a couple of calls. We have no cell service where we are but I’m catching a little WiFi off Verizon from somewhere… hmmm… I’m a happy worker.
I call our new boss and let him know we’re in town and set-up at the campground. We already had people asking us this and that and WE had NO clue what was going on! Talk about trial by fire! So, like always, we threw ourselves into the midst of it.
Next thing we know, we get back to our camper and campsite and get thrown into the mechanics of our new job for the next 6 weeks… our bosses show up and we are in training! Full blown! Training! Thank goodness we only traveled 100 miles today.
Unbeknown to us… we had landed in the UP of Michigan at Peak Season. We quickly realized all we had on our side was a camper FULL of groceries, fuel, a bit of WiFi from someone’s booster in the woods or Verizon and some common sense.
We had arrived on Friday, July 26 which was a mistake. We should have never arrived on a Friday to one of the busiest National Forest Campgrounds in the area! Again, newbie mistake!
Saturday, we spent about 3 hours each in training. Trapper learning to properly clean vault toilets and me going over all the manual paperwork that has to be done for the US Forest Service. Then I learned I have to rewrite computerized printouts to turn in weekly!??? I’m having flashbacks to FedEx where so much stuff is manual. Why do manual records exists in today’s world??? But, we only have six weeks here… we can do this – we can handle it!
So, why did we agree to do this? It’s simple…. we wanted to.
Perks to this job? Of course there are… I’ll do a run down at the end of our contract time (Labor Day) – but upfront here’s what we saw and were offered.
- Gas allowance for their 2500 gas generator ($100/month – which was paid per pay period/broken down per person)
- Small campground – only 47 sites
- Propane supplied
- Super nice “host” site (with a sewer hook-up for black and gray water)
- All expectations in writing
- W-2 provided (no 1099 work)
- Nice equipment to work with – golf cart, gas for golf cart, supplies for campground, etc)
- A 15 gallon water tank to port water to our rig using their 12V pump and tank and golf cart to haul it. Pretty nice!
- A landline phone…
We got our 2-3 hours of training and roughly scheduled a few more hours the next day. For me, I hate travel days and getting thrust into this was exciting and nerve wrecking. But, we’ll do it!