The SECRETS of Colossal Cave's JOB Offer

Got a whale of a tale to tell you lads....  This one HURT.  With wandering awe we finished our trip from Orlando to Vale, Arizona, and met Colossal Cave Mountain Park.  The spirit of this cactus-covered land was pure peace and inspiration.  The pictures are of our temporary parking spot at the first camp site.   Even though we'd been offered the camp host position a month ago, the existing 5th wheel on the site had not been moved and the road had not been graded (anywhere in the campground) so we couldn't drive up to the host site anyway.

Then we met our boss...the wonderful Martie Maierhauser, who had been overseeing the park for 50 years.  She lost her husband, Joe, in 2008... but he still had a strong presence and even a desk in the main office.  Martie explained the rare beauty and biological diversity of the park, and its fascinating history.  But we soon found we had a problem:  There was no vehicle to help us do our job.  The sizable distances between the 3 camping areas, the ranch, and the cave (high up on the side of a cliff) made it out of the question to manage the area on foot.  And the RV could not travel the washed out, rocky roads.  We decided to visit Tucson while Martie saw what she could do about preparing the host site.  We started with the Pima Air and Space Museum.  They were having a marvelous educational event centered on a paper airplane competition.

All of the kids had a cool shirt that said, "I folded, I flew, I made history".  But I was looking for my favorite:  the SR-71. 

So...I couldn't get even half of this stealth machine in the picture frame...so I tried making a movie.

I found out all of Arizona is in the middle of a SciTech Festival.  I just adore the "doing" of science.  There's even an Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” Symposium next month at this museum.

We walked through the 5 giant hangers with our mouths open.  The interactive displays were phenomenal with excellent histories, photos of the planes in action and actual period artifacts.

This NASA Aero Spacelines 377-SG Super Guppy was my favorite.   It was built big to move segments of rockets, including much of the Saturn rocket that powered the Apollo Program.

We walked our legs off and then went back in the main hangar to check out how the paper airplane races were going.

We had walked ourselves numb, so Bob took a nap out in the RV.  He suddenly woke up and said, "Let's go see my childhood friend, Justin Schmidt."  I had no idea who that might be, but we headed across Tucson to find him.

 

It turned out he's Dr. Justin O. Schmidt, a research entomologist at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson.  He studies apiculture- the science of beekeeping- with an emphasis on bee nutrition, chemical communication, physiology, ecology and behavior of bees.  And his wife, Li, is a very talented doctor, a Family Practice Physician with 14 years business, and about to open her own practice.  They are both fascinating to listen to.   Justin has ongoing experiments right in his backyard.  They are both celebrities in their fields and in our eyes, certainly.  They are generous, very kind people. Their two sons are extremely bright and original...and well loved.  Click here to read an article by Scientific American Frontiers about Justin. 

JOB HUNT - Looking for the PERFECT JOB



Star Trek Enterprise Worm Hole w/Captain Kirk & Spock

  We took the Worm Hole escape route and immediately began our search for a new job. 

I had no problem landing a job with only one duty:  State the firm command, "Engage!"



Our next task was to find the perfect camp site for the night.  We did!... at Jetty Park for $32.  "Perfect" meant it was dry and the camper was free from flying black marsh fiends.  We slept like hibernating bears in the quiet, flood-free peace. 

Bob found the fishing more than adequate on the Jetty Pier.  He had the best time ever helping an old Korean man haul in 4-foot ribbon fish with teeth that could bite you to the bone!  I turned my attention to the cruise ships and their mobs of whooping, laughing, celebrating passengers.  They were offering $10 day cruises on the casino ships.  Should we join in?

Nah.  Being hard-core about finding a job, we went to Kennedy Space Center.  The Shuttle program has ended, so there's no jobs there....but we learned plans are still active for sending some of us on to Mars.  I signed up.



Camp Hosting on Mars....what have I gotten myself into!???

 

The newest rover.  This one has space suits attached to the back so you can slip in and out of them through a lock so you don't bring clinging space dust into your rover.  Clever.  Perhaps we should do that with our kids so their dirty clothes and muddy shoes never come inside. 

 Bob went for a more technical job...repairing the Hubble Space Telescope...yet another time...from the platform of the International Space Station.  Yes, even though the last Soyuz Rocket failed....(uh, blew up) we are still planning to send up more of our astronauts on these crowded Russian space ships.  We have too!  We have a 3-man crew stranded on the ISS and wanting to come home for Christmas... or sometime in their lives.

Well...we didn't enjoy living apart....so we agreed on a campground hosting position on the MOON.  If you've ever dealt with  Lunar Regolith  ...then you know you've got serious cleaning problems.  We already had enough cleaning problems back on earth.  Our camp site at Jetty Park (#91) had not been cleaned.  The grill was full of ashes and old charcoal and the ground was strewn with litter.  In fact, the entire park needed a lot of picking up and trimming.  I wrote to management and said we'd be happy to workamp for them and get the park in shape.     I got this reply from Ann Johnson within hours:  

Oct 28 - We did try campground hosts several years ago and it did not work out well at all. We will be doing some renovations this year and there are changes I think you will not only like but will enjoy.                                                                                                                               

Ann

WHAT??!!  We'd never heard anything negative about camp hosts before.  What happened?

We took the above litter-strewn path to the campground office.  We talked with the person who checked us into Jetty Park Campground and she knew nothing about problems with onery camp hosts, but she did say they had a job in maintenance for a free site.  Bob was not interested, as we'd heard so many bad/sad stories about "light maintenance".  It's a fact that any and everything can need fixing at any time, so the 20 hours for a site is really 24/7....you are full time.  Most camp hosts have mentally left behind full-time work and aren't suited to it anymore.  So let's keep looking for that perfect job!