Resident Volunteering in the Florida

State Parks

Why would you want to do this?

Dave and I are about 18 months into our fulltime adventure and while going back to Minnesota in the summer and working on the cabin is fun, we wanted a way to give back and still experience areas we couldn’t normally see, for more than just those few months. (And to be honest, I wanted a way to get Dave out of the house once in a while, so I could write and blog in peace and quiet. Well, except for the occasional yorkie barking!)

There are multiple options to work on the road and actually earn dollars if you’d prefer. We were more interested in trading our time for a full hook up site and to be able to be in a place that we either couldn’t afford – think the Florida Keys – or to travel through the many Florida state parks that don’t even allow camping. Enter Florida resident volunteering. Fun fact – the Florida state park system has ~1,033 employees and 10,411 volunteers they use to maintain and keep Florida parks in service.

So, we wrote our resume, applied on their website, interviewed for the position, completed some online training and were offered our resident volunteer position in Lovers Key State Park. I don’t want to make this sound hard, or easy. There is a time investment for you on the front side just to get the interview and yep, just like if you were applying for a paying job, you share your skills, your strengths and especially your level of customer service skills. Lucky us, we got a great position with Lovers Key state park down in Fort Myers Beach area and just 5 miles from Dave’s dad. Having never done this before, this was a perfect first position to get our feet wet – as it were.

PowerPoint Presentation (floridastateparks.org)

On the job – what’s it like day to day?

We arrived at Lovers Key on August 28th. When we were offered the job, we accepted with a commitment of 4 months, so would be there until December 31st. This is the maximum time you can commit to any one single park in a year and since we were so close to Dave’s dad, we thought it was worth it to just go the full amount of our time limit. We figured we could do anything for 4 months. Our site had full hookups, was spacious and the only gotcha was getting into it with such a large fifth wheel. More from some of the trees overhanging the road, than anything else. We had validated this size of Homer wasn’t going to be a problem, and it wasn’t, but getting in there was a little hairy.

We were given a couple of days to get settled and set up, had a tour of the park and met some of the team members we would be working with during our tenure. We were also given our work schedule. We knew we had to provide 20 hours each week, between the two of us, in order to meet our commitment for the RV site. I had of course researched, I had read, I had done all the googling I could do to make sure what we knew what we were getting into when we signed up for this gig. It sounded wonderful considering we could use our 20 hours to really make this park shine and maybe even improve it, and 20 hours is nothing, right?

I could picture myself cutting and trimming grass and all the little kids running around and having picnics. I could picture us trimming ditches and all the wildflowers that would grow once I was done. I could picture weeding the butterfly gardens and seeing all the new and amazing colors of the butterflies. I could picture walking the beach and picking up trash so no little boy or girl would get an owie on their foot. I would work 10 hours a week, Dave would work 10 hours a week and the rest of the time we could explore this amazing park and area. Plus, 5 miles from Dave’s dad and he would get to spend some much-needed time with his father. It was going to be wonderful! All sunshine and roses in my head!

Now, I want to be very clear about our thoughts and experience. In NO WAY are we complaining about this role or the Florida state park system. We ended up absolutely loving this new experience and “our” park as we came to think about it. I just want to share how when you think you know what you’re getting into and it just ends up being something different. I would guess we have all done that at some time in our lives……..

To start off with, there is no freewheeling, work when you want to, kind of schedule. Same with the jobs that you work. This park is open 7 days a week and from 8 AM until dusk each of those days. There are very specific jobs that have to be done in the am, in the pm and then throughout the day. This was not something we understood when we signed up. Remember how this lifestyle is all about flexibility? Well, so is the schedule you may work when you are a resident volunteer. The park was very short staffed when we arrived, and this led to some scheduling opportunities for our volunteer coordinator. She did a great job and being new, was learning while she went. There were 3 of us couples that were all new to this experience as well, and it was nice that we all ended up pulling together to get the work completed, and fair for everyone even if it meant working more days in a row, than we thought it would be, at first.

There are specific start and end times for each shift and, you can’t just jump in and start doing something you may be comfortable with from your past experience. For instance, both Dave and I had to be trained on how to use a weed whip, drive a golf cart, use a lawnmower, etc., even though we have 30 plus years of cabin/home ownership and had used these items for decades. The Florida state park system takes safety very seriously and wants to keep everyone out of harm’s way, including yourselves.

For our first couple of weeks, we were doing training on equipment and learning all the ins and outs of the jobs assigned in the a.m. and p.m. Dave and I worked all the shifts together to make sure we understood all the work and to get our training completed. We cleaned a lot of bathrooms, hauled a lot of trash, picked up garbage people left behind, cleaned grills, all those “icky” jobs that still have to be done every single day. There were days when we started at 3 pm and didn’t get back inside Homer until 8:30 pm at night and then started the next day at 7 a.m. We were tired. After almost 2 years of no schedules and no alarms in the morning, this was a wake-up call for both of us. Plus, we decided to start this adventure in August. After having a total of 3, above 80 degree days all summer in Northern Minnesota, we were sweating our a#$es off 10 minutes after we stepped outside.

Fast forward and we are at about the end of week 2. We’ve got this cleaning stuff down and it really doesn’t take that much time. We’ve been all over the park and seen all the areas where we know we can make a difference for the good. Have you used a zero-turn mower? What a rush that is when you have 2 acres of grass to mow and it is the picnic area where all the kids run and play, and it really needs to be mowed! How about driving a tram back and forth to the beach? We met so many interesting people while doing that job and it became one of our favorites and something we looked forward to each time we were assigned.

Then, there were two things we did to ourselves while doing this work, now what I would term more a labor of love. Rather than splitting the shifts, which was very much an option, we both ended up working all the hours. We were just plain having fun doing it together and second, we started identifying more work for ourselves and to get it done, we both needed to work those hours! For instance, all those over hanging branches on our road into the campsite, are now gone. We just didn’t want anyone else bringing in a rig behind us and thinking they were going to lose an air conditioner. Trimming the roads, Dave couldn’t take it and he became an expert lopper of branches wherever he went. Organizing a conference room – you know I can’t help myself on that one. All in all, the work took on a different meaning and we became very attached to our little “Lovers Key” state park and the people that work there. We really did admire the dedication and talent of “our” rangers and enjoyed working with each of them.

Through all of this, we discovered so many new animals that we live with in the park. You can imagine my surprise the first time I learned what a palm rat is and that they like to run throughout park buildings. It’s really fun when they are in your cleaning supply closet and “jump” out at you when you open the door. Or;

• How about when you are just taking a short break and hear a small rustle. You look up, thinking you will see a new kind of bird, and instead discover a palm rat and the snake that was trying to eat it, both fall from a tree that’s 20 feet above you and only 15 feet away. Yikes!
• The time we got to participate in seeing a baby sea turtle take its first swim in the big, warm gulf waters at sunset. What an amazing experience and new memory we shared with all the other people around us.
• How about the gopher tortoise that Dave and Max would meet every night on their walk together and got so used to them, it just kept right on eating.
• The huge iguanas and all the little geckos that are everywhere and scamper off whenever you get near, only to go right back to where they were as soon as you pass then by.
• The no-seeums that are relentless and 1000 times worse than mosquitos. I actually look like I have a case of the measles because I am so covered in bites and scabs. Gross!
• The fire ants that are everywhere in the sand and marshy areas of the park and their bite really, really, hurts
• Mud daubers that eat spiders and are a good thing, or the size of the spiders!!!!!!! Some of them are HUGE!

Would we do it again?

In a heartbeat! Hurrican Ian may have put a stop to our time at our beautiful little park and we didn’t get to do all the things we wanted to, but it was so worth it for us. After we were safely out of the way of the worst of the storm and had a chance to meet up with our fellow couples that worked in the park with us, we all said we would do it again and even talked about how much we missed being back there, already. We would love nothing better than to get that call saying we could come back and help with the clean-up. The park is only accessible by boat right now given the integrity of the bridges to the island and no, I am not putting Homer on pontoons to get him back there, no matter how much I miss this very special place. We do know all our rangers are safe and they are most definitely in our thoughts as we think about all they have lost after working so hard to make Lovers Key the magical place it is.

For Dave and I, this started out as just another new adventure and turned itself into something so much more. We definitely got more from this experience than we gave and along the way, we made some new friends that we hope to work with again in the future. We hope “our” Lovers Key state park will be back on its feet soon and provide hours of enjoyment to the community and pride to the rangers that work so hard to make it successful and our greatest hope is we can return to it, the same time, next year.

See ya on the road,

Dave and Theresa