Right after I wrote that last post, my life changed dramatically (again!) and we made some MAJOR changes.
We moved out of the apartment that was killing us financially - that was in large part because many things increased in price, including the rent, but our incomes did not increase enough to make up for the increased outflows. It became obvious that our youngest daughter was not going to come back and live in the apartment with her brother, and so we finally made the decision to move out of the apartment and back into the vintage trailer we'd been storing for over a year.
About that time we also decided to consider working one more season for Amazon, and spent a couple of days up around their Haslett, TX location. However, that facility was full up with workcampers, so we opted for Campbellsville, Kentucky, where we've been since the first part of August.
We spent a month in Round Rock as we finished up the cleaning and packing and donating (you should SEE the stack of Goodwill donation receipts we have now) and pulled out of Round Rock around the middle of July. Our private joke is that for my husband's 73rd birthday, he got to turn in the keys to the apartment, and for my 59th birthday, we got to leave Round Rock, Texas.
The trip from Texas to Kentucky was probably the best time I've had in years. We stayed a week up in a campground near the youngest daughter's new home, and then meandered our way on towards Kentucky.
Highest point of the trip was visiting the diamond mine state park in Arkansas. We loved the campground, and actually enjoyed it so much that we opted out of another place we'd been meaning to stop in order to stay an extra night. Digging for diamonds was very physically exhausting work, but we had so much fun, it's hard to describe why it was so much fun to work so darned hard for essentially nothing (we found no diamonds). We want to go back and stay longer sometime in the future.
Driving through Tennessee was beautiful - I only wish we'd been touring rather than heading to a destination, because there were so many places I wanted to stop. I think we could spend months exploring Tennessee, but that's for another time.
Kentucky is also beautiful, although we haven't seen much of it since arriving here. Our campground is essentially a gravel field, but it's the closest one to town and is across the street from the Amazon fulfillment center. Since we have our disabled adult son sharing space with us until we find a placement for him, we thought it wise to choose this place over the others.
Work started on August 1, and we've only had to work overtime once since we got here. Yay! While I know that the overtime is the biggest reason many workcampers come to Amazon for peak, we have had some other things going on that has made us appreciate the lack of overtime. Our workweek crosses 2 payperiods, so Friday and Saturday complete one week, while Sunday and Monday start a new payperiod. We have a mid-week break instead of a weekend, with Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday as our days off. Mandatory OT day is Thursday.
This experience has been quite different from our last peak in Coffeyville, though. If it were just hubby and I doing this, we'd be having quite an enjoyable time. The addition of our son, however, increases the stress. Not only is it more work to cook and clean with 3 people and 2 cats in this 33 foot vintage trailer, we've taken on a second project, and are fixing up a vintage TREK truck camper, and we need to buy a long bed pickup truck to carry it.
Well, this is probably way too long for a blog post, but I had a lot of stuff to share, and I have more stuff on my mind that will have to wait for another day.
Thanks for reading and please know that I am wishing you Health and Prosperity.
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