Thursday, January 13, 2011
VIP Campground, Badlands Natl Park, SD - 7/30-9/6
We decided to try volunteering somewhere that had paved roads leading to it, since we are reluctant to take our aging truck & trailer back down the Chaco road. We want to continue traveling for several more years (unless we decide otherwise this fall in ABQ!!), and finances necessitate that this rig holds out if we are to do that.
This is the first park that has put us on a real schedule: 32 hours each per week. It is way too much like a "real job" for Willie's taste. It is not what she retired to do. It is nice to volunteer and give SOMETHING back to the parks, but over half of your "productive" week seems too much to ask. Our work days are Friday through Monday, our schedule is 2:30-11:00 with 1/2 hour off for a quick dinner. We have various assigned duties throughout the day, including "personing" the solar telescopes from 3-4, "personing" the Visitor Center (VC) desk from 5-7, and attending Night Sky programs from 7:45-11ish. The telescope work is quite enjoyable and the rest of it is minimally rewarding but mainly quite tedious.
The most exciting thing that has happened here is that, after our a/c continued to decline in function, and the temps shot up to over 100, we were getting desperate. When it got to about 94 inside, Doug tried running water on the roof to see if that would cool off the trailer a bit (evaporative cooling). We then left for an ice-cream social for park employees & volunteers, but not before Doug shut off the water, or thought he did. Evidently what he did was turn it up, since a couple of minutes later there was lots of water gushing off of our trailer. This caused a big commotion among the park staff, because they are always conscious of water usage (and wastage!). Doug explained the problem to one of the supervisors who suggested we talk with Brian, the guy in the trailer right across from ours, who is the main HVAC guy in the park. Within two days, he had looked at it and found a wiring problem that was fairly serious. He corrected this problem and now our a/c is functioning properly. Aren't we lucky that CW was not able to install a new a/c? If they had, they would have never checked where this wiring was and the problem would have still been hidden. The wires were bundled together inside a large "wad" of electrical tape, and all was getting overheated and slowly melting. We lucked out again!!
The first week of our stay here, our friend Sue Horne visited us. She came for 6 nights, and we did a lot of sightseeing and had an excellent visit. Since we find the work schedule to be fairly exhausting, plus we "have to" spend a good portion of our free time over at the lodge on their WiFi in order to continue our games on Facebook, we find we only do one or two major activities on our 3 days off.
Last Wednesday, friends Dave & Diane from Rapid City, met us at Wall Drug Store, where we had lunch and played cards in their cafe for several hours of fun & laughter. The next day we went down to the South Unit, which is on Oglala Lakota (formerly called Sioux by white people) tribal land and managed jointly by the tribe and the NPS. We visited Sheep Mountain Table, which is more lovely than any of the more accessible areas in the north unit, and the White River VC, which is staffed by Lakota. We then visited Oglala Lakota College and Historical Center in nearby Kyle, SD. The museum gives a pictorial and audio history of the Oglala Lakota from the early 1800s through the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. It was enlightening but also very sad to see how much we have changed the lives of the Native Americans in ways that can never be made right again.
This is the first park that has put us on a real schedule: 32 hours each per week. It is way too much like a "real job" for Willie's taste. It is not what she retired to do. It is nice to volunteer and give SOMETHING back to the parks, but over half of your "productive" week seems too much to ask. Our work days are Friday through Monday, our schedule is 2:30-11:00 with 1/2 hour off for a quick dinner. We have various assigned duties throughout the day, including "personing" the solar telescopes from 3-4, "personing" the Visitor Center (VC) desk from 5-7, and attending Night Sky programs from 7:45-11ish. The telescope work is quite enjoyable and the rest of it is minimally rewarding but mainly quite tedious.
The most exciting thing that has happened here is that, after our a/c continued to decline in function, and the temps shot up to over 100, we were getting desperate. When it got to about 94 inside, Doug tried running water on the roof to see if that would cool off the trailer a bit (evaporative cooling). We then left for an ice-cream social for park employees & volunteers, but not before Doug shut off the water, or thought he did. Evidently what he did was turn it up, since a couple of minutes later there was lots of water gushing off of our trailer. This caused a big commotion among the park staff, because they are always conscious of water usage (and wastage!). Doug explained the problem to one of the supervisors who suggested we talk with Brian, the guy in the trailer right across from ours, who is the main HVAC guy in the park. Within two days, he had looked at it and found a wiring problem that was fairly serious. He corrected this problem and now our a/c is functioning properly. Aren't we lucky that CW was not able to install a new a/c? If they had, they would have never checked where this wiring was and the problem would have still been hidden. The wires were bundled together inside a large "wad" of electrical tape, and all was getting overheated and slowly melting. We lucked out again!!
The first week of our stay here, our friend Sue Horne visited us. She came for 6 nights, and we did a lot of sightseeing and had an excellent visit. Since we find the work schedule to be fairly exhausting, plus we "have to" spend a good portion of our free time over at the lodge on their WiFi in order to continue our games on Facebook, we find we only do one or two major activities on our 3 days off.
Last Wednesday, friends Dave & Diane from Rapid City, met us at Wall Drug Store, where we had lunch and played cards in their cafe for several hours of fun & laughter. The next day we went down to the South Unit, which is on Oglala Lakota (formerly called Sioux by white people) tribal land and managed jointly by the tribe and the NPS. We visited Sheep Mountain Table, which is more lovely than any of the more accessible areas in the north unit, and the White River VC, which is staffed by Lakota. We then visited Oglala Lakota College and Historical Center in nearby Kyle, SD. The museum gives a pictorial and audio history of the Oglala Lakota from the early 1800s through the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. It was enlightening but also very sad to see how much we have changed the lives of the Native Americans in ways that can never be made right again.
# posted by Doug and Willie @ 11:01 AM 
