What's New 2003

December 13, 2003 

We arrived in Yuma with no travel mishaps this time. We had a leisurely journey through California, visiting friends and relatives and realized why we normally always make the trip home through the back roads of Nevada and eastern Oregon. It was nice to see everyone, but it’s not a trip we’ll do any time soon. We couldn’t dodge the traffic but did dodge having to stay at expensive RV parks by staying with friends or dry camping at truck stops until we reached the desert outside of Needles where we had a proper boondocking site just before leaving California.

We easily found a lot to rent in The Foothills section of Yuma and quickly got set up. The concept here is pretty unique for those not familiar with it. There is a huge section of lots that are individually owned and they are zoned for RV use, site built homes, or manufactured. The development was started quite awhile ago but just keeps going and going and is now in its 30th phase. The newer sections have actually upgraded quite a bit as things grow ever more expensive and it has helped that these sections also surround a very nice golf course with an additional course now under construction.

 

When you rent one of these, you don’t actually get the entire lot since the rental rates are based “per hookup”, which usually means two but sometimes three RVs per lot. To date, we don’t have a neighbor, probably because the sign out front on ours reads “For Sale” in very large letters and “For Rent” in very small letters! Even with a neighbor, it is still much more space than afforded in an RV park and the rents are also way cheaper. This lot is about 70 feet x 127 feet so adequately holds the additional vehicles we brought along.

In just two short weeks we’re falling in love with life in the desert. Our section is very quiet, close to the mountains, and extremely relaxing. Walking is fun here as there are so many new casitas, RV setups, and homes to gawk at. Neighbors are friendly. We easily found work. Sunrises and sunsets put on a magnificent daily display. We’re wearing shorts in December. Life is good.  

Marc is doing a home addition and building a shed for some friends and I will start working as a cashier at the nearby Ace Hardware next week. We will do a full journal entry later in the season as we have more to report.  

Have a safe and joyous Christmas and get your New Year off to a good start!

November 21, 2003 

We’ve been accomplishing lots of little tasks and trying to spend time with all our family since arriving in Bend. The kids are busy with work and school, so moments with them have been limited. There’s really no need for us to stay through the holidays, waiting around in cold and stormy weather just to spend a day together.  

While here however, we’ve made the big decision to return in April and fix up our place for sale and tackle the onerous task of selling off most of our possessions. 

Sunday we leave; I will pull Marc’s work trailer and tools to Yuma behind the Dodge and we’ll give a handyman business a shot for the winter there. Marc will be mobile to be able to do RV repairs, welding, plumbing, electrical, or shed construction on site for the many snowbirds that winter there. (If you winter in Yuma and are reading this, email us if you need any work done!). We hope we’re not too late in arriving to rent an RV lot rather than having to go in to an RV park.  

We still hope to be able to spend some time in Quartzsite during the Big Event in January and we’ll do a journal page of our winter months, so be sure and follow along. We wish you the best of holidays and safe travels if you are a fellow RVer.

October 15, 2003 

We’ll soon be leaving Moab; places to go and people to see. After an intended night of boondocking near Flagstaff on the night of the 23rd, we will be staying with yet unmet RV friends Julie & Donny from Ohio. They are workamping at an RV resort in Phoenix. Julie and I have been good penpals for nearly three years, so this visit is much anticipated! From there, we will continue on to Yuma to see other friends, check the job situation for winter, and walk across the Mexican border to obtain prescriptions. Then, it will be head the wagon for home to check in with our kids, do some needed maintenance on the rig, and spend the holidays with family.  

We will plan on doing an update to the web pages once we return to Bend and have high speed Internet available. We’ll tell you about our winter plans then, so check back soon.

 September 5, 2003 

After leaving Dinosaur National Monument (to be posted soon), Marc decided he wanted to head for Moab, UT, mountain bike capital of the world. We arrived on September 3rd and checked in to a downtown campground with modem access. Upon downloading the Workamper Hotline, we noticed a local ad for workampers to finish out the season at Portal RV Park. We jumped in the truck and drove straight there to talk to the owners. They hired us immediately and asked us to move in right away! We spent our first evening here going out to dinner with two of the other workampers couples; a pleasant surprise and 180 degree difference from the experience we just had at KOA. Things are looking up! 

We will start our jobs on Monday, which gives us three days off to further explore this neat little town and some of the surrounding country. I will work in the office and Marc will do maintenance and cleaning. Moab is in extremely close proximity to several major national parks; the closest being Arches, about two miles from our location, which is almost right on the Colorado River.  

We have a full hookup site with Internet and cable TV and Marc & I will work three six hour days. That will give us plenty of time to explore this beautiful area at our leisure. Watch our journal updates for pictures of the town and our spot. We’ll also, of course, spotlight all the major parks in the area. We’re in another beautiful location, as can be seen from Portal’s website  http:/www.portalrvpark.com

 August 27, 2003 

Our tenure at West Yellowstone KOA has drawn to a close more than a month early. They told us they were over staffed and things had slowed down too quickly and we were no longer needed. Our next plans? 

We pull out of here Friday the 29. We think we’re heading south, traveling the back roads of Wyoming and Utah in hopes of obtaining late season work at some of the other parks or major resort areas along the way. We’ve heard that Bryce and Grand Canyon are hiring.  

Check back soon for an update and find out where we are!

August 1, 2003

We’ve been spending the last month workamping in West Yellowstone at the large KOA. The weather has been hot and the job hard work but having the proximity to Yellowstone is great. We’ll save comments about this workamping experience until the end of the season before we give it an evaluation. You can see pictures and stories of the area under Yellowstone Sojourn on the Finally Fulltime button.

We apologize for our slow updates this summer but we have no Internet access to upload pages. Marc did a little horse trading of some welding labor to obtain high speed long enough for us to get these pages posted. That may or may not occur again so it could be as late as October until our next update.

June 8, 2003 and we’re outa here! 

The past week has been a whirlwind of packing and cleaning. Taking the screen room down necessitated a thorough scrubbing to remove the salt before packing it away. We spent one last enjoyable Sunday with some new found friends, fulltimers Terry & Marilyn from Washington teaching them the techniques of clamming. They also travel in a Travel Supreme and medium duty truck. Terry is a retired truck driver so he & Marc were able to compare war stories as they enjoyed the sunshine we’ve had here recently. 

Rachael’s big event was last evening; she was nervous, excited and beautiful as she and 200 of her classmates became the Class of 2003 and said goodbye to childhood. We’re very proud of her accomplishment! A bonus was the fact that she won a Sony stereo and $50 at her all night party.  

        

A six hour drive to Bend and we’re on our way….

May 22, 2003—about fulltiming

From Coos Bay, OR 

For those who follow our site, we appreciate your support and interest in our tales. We hope to keep the website updated with wonderful pictures and stories of our workamping experiences. You may see some changes in the format shortly, as we switch the Travels section to a journal format to make it easier to navigate. When we do this, we will probably also change the way we do the pictures. It’s very likely we won’t have high speed Internet access to do the updating and with showing a thumbnail and larger picture it takes quite a bit of bandwidth and time to upload the updates. To make it easier from a dial-up, we will be reducing the size and unfortunately, the quality of the pictures. I think people enjoy seeing more pictures, less text and more frequent updates than a few higher quality full pictures and gobs of text. Don’t you?  

Plan to tune in by mid-July and we hope to have our first new update completed and posted. Thereafter, we’ll try and do an update at least monthly, depending upon Internet access.  

We’re on day 17 of our countdown as the time grows so short! We figure the departure date of June 8th the actual beginning to our fulltiming lifestyle since we’re technically free to hit the highways, even though we’re headed to Bend to take care of some things. 

Among RVers, there’s always discussions as to just what constitutes fulltiming. We will consider ourselves fulltiming since we won’t live in anything other than our RV, although some would say the fact that we still own a home disqualifies us to wear the pseudonym. I always like to say the proof is in the pudding; if we travel, live, and work from our RV how does this NOT qualify us? 

I will say one thing however; our transition is much less work than a lot of folks go through with selling their homes and weeding through their lifetime of possessions. We don’t have to cross that bridge at this time, although it looms in the future at some distant date. I’m sure a majority of fulltimers utilize their road travel to scope out the very best cities, climates and environments in which to eventually resettle. Most will tell you they have no idea how long that will take—and that’s exactly what we will say at this point!  

Our absolute anticipation of this event is being tempered by leaving Rachael behind. As the days grow short, I’m developing a bad case of Empty Nester syndrome; it’s much worse than I ever imagined it would be. Every moment now is to be savored with the knowledge that our relationship will be forever changed as she gains responsibility for herself and makes her own way in the world. There will be so much about her being around that I will miss.  

An epiphany: we now no longer have any long range plans. This in itself, is such an anomaly to the way most of us live our lives. You think of yourself in the same job, planning your two week vacation, reaching life’s milestones and your life just kind of stretches out in front of you, then dwindles away, perhaps with very little anticipation. All of a sudden, we now are short term thinkers. Fulltimers have always talked about it, but one truly does not understand the sensation and absolute sense of freedom until one is about to be engaged in it. For people like us, who thrive on change, the thought of not knowing exactly where we’ll be six months from now is deliciously delightful and exciting. It produces an unexplainable giddiness more powerful than any drug. Freedom over your own life--what a way to live! 

For those of you who have just got to know what’s next for the Duskes however, we’ll try and give you a clue! After our stint in Yellowstone, we intend returning to Bend to check up on everything and everyone during the month of October. We are already actively investigating job possibilities for winter/spring in the southwest and feel we will most likely end up somewhere in Arizona, although we don’t know in which month. We’d like to take at least a month off to enjoy boondocking with all the other RVers in Quartzsite but having the ability to do that will depend upon what happens with jobs. While we’re in Yellowstone, we’re making it a point to introduce ourselves to other potential employers (those we turned down this year) as we’d like to have multiple offers to return to that area the following season. Not that we have made any decisions to spend a second summer in that area, but we figure having job offers all sewn up and waiting for us could be a good thing. <big smile> 

March 8, 2003

There have been a lot of changes for us this year in our time along Oregon’s seacoast. The most dramatic has been the fact of Rachael being able to graduate from high school a year early, which will put us on the road well in advance of when we had projected.  

Soon, by the first part of June, it will be a mad dash to get her set up in our home in Bend, where she will live with her brother and sister-in-law while she attends the local college. We purchased her a car; we’ve got her enrolled for the fall term. How to teach her everything else for independent living in the short time that remains? 

The most surprising change is having decided to go for a work camping job this summer, even though our time frame put us mid-season for doing so. After mailing out or submitting many on-line applications, we were pleasantly surprised at the many positive responses we received. We chose an offer from West Yellowstone KOA and we will be working for them from July 1 to October 1 at their location six miles from the west entrance to Yellowstone. Marc will be doing maintenance and Claudia will work in the office registering campers and also occasionally on the cabin cleaning crew. It’s a large, busy campground and we’re really looking forward to this new experience.  

Best of all will be the free time we can use to fully explore this wonderful part of the country. We figure our new motorcycles will be the perfect Yellowstone Park and national forest transportation. Easy to park, easy to maneuver in crowds and easy to stop and snap photos of the wildlife. If any of you are traveling through that section this summer, be sure and look us up! 

Finally, after five years of planning, OUR time is nearly here. We will attempt updates of our web pages during the summer if we can get Internet access. The journey begins soon….