From: United States
Couple account
United States
10/10/2018 - 30/06/2019
Hi all,
Man-o-man, where do we start. Our names are Marty & Sarah. We are a married, and very happily retired couple that love to travel and explore new environments and meet people. What we consider our biggest accomplishments in life is successfully raising our 5 children, getting them all through college and then onto productive lives of their own. That done, we sold our house and are now full time RV’rs. We’ve been living this nomadic lifestyle for about two years now and love it. We can’t wait to see what adventures the next few years bring.
One thing that did come out of our first year on the road is the desire to do a little less driving and a little more interacting with locals in various parts of the United States. We were wondering how best to do that and then we discovered workaway.info. It was like wow, this is just what we had in mind.
Since then we have worked at 4 different workaway sights from Ontario, Canada to Florida, USA. Each location we worked at was from 15-20 days and the variety of tasks we worked on is much to long to list the specifics of here but generally it was building, permaculture and animal care related. We have to be honest and say that not every minute of every workaway location was amazing, but overall each location has been a positive experience, especially in regards to what we learned, satisfaction in providing a helping hand to our host and the wonderful people we have had the pleasure to work with. We look forward to many more workaway experiences as we continue to travel the world.
We knew when we started traveling that we’d see lots of amazing scenery but one thing that surprised us was the large number of awesome people we met along the way. Many of those people we continue to keep in touch with and hope to meet up with again someday/somewhere.
We’re probably not the typical RV’rs because we have set up our home (21’ camper & pickup truck) with a solar system, etc. that allows us to choose campsites “off the grid” so to speak. That being said, 90% of our camping is done in remote forest service or federal BLM land with no utility hookups. No, we are not hermits or recluses. We just enjoy the satisfaction of being self sufficient and out in the backcountry where we can backpack, canoe, watch wildlife and just plain enjoy the natural world around us.
That said, we do like to socialize and share our adventures, experience and lives with others. Having been through the normal work and career stages of life, we still have a lot of energy and lots of life experiences to share with others of all ages. Even though Sarah & I are in our 50-60’s some of the couples we have hit it off best with during our travels, and continue to stay in touch with, are couples half our age.
As far as our professional backgrounds, Sarah is a licensed veterinarian and owned her own small animal veterinary business for over 32 years. Along with that she showed Morgan horses for over 40 years and grew up on a chicken farm. I (Marty) was in the electric generation industry for over 27 years in roles all the way from laborer to management. Before that I was a carpenter/woodworker and enjoyed the pride and satisfaction of building my own house from scratch. Although we have the knowledge and experience to continue in our previous rolls, our wish going forward is to live a much simpler life. By simple we don’t mean lazy. We are both very active in most all outdoor activities and we do not shy away from hard work, in fact we almost crave it after all our years in the hectic business environment. We both have cared for, and cleaned up after, a lot of animals (primarily horses) in our day and relish getting back to some of those simpler activities. We also have a fair amount of experience in gardening, home improvement, land management, and as I mentioned....raising kids.
After growing up in upstate New York, and dealing with the long, cold winters there, our travel/workaway plans are to stay in warm areas of the country, wherever that may be. Because our home is always with us wherever we travel (within North America) we generally would not need housing provided for us, instead we would need a place to park, and live in, our truck & camper. We chose to not travel with pets, don’t smoke, don’t have a electric generator for our power and have a lot of flexibility in our travel destinations and durations. We look forward to meeting you and helping out in any way we can.
Take care, Marty & Sarah
Gardening
Building
General Maintenance
Cooking / shopping
Farmstay
Other
Help with Eco project
Help in the house
Animal care
Language practice
Teaching
Animal care (including veterinary),
Carpentry / Woodworking,
Mellow Personalities,
Positive interaction with all age groups,
Land management,
Gardening / Permaculture,
Take it in stride attitude,
Horse care/training (English & Western),
Child care,
Summer student work coordination,
Outdoor activities (camping, backpacking, canoeing, etc.) instruction,
Cooking (not professionally),
Photography.
English & a little (un poco) Spanish
58 & 64
Just that we are looking forward to continuing the experiences and opportunities that this service has to offer...not just for us but also for any host that is willing to take a chance on us.
Smoker
Driver's licence
Allergies
No
Special dietary requirements
No, love most anything!
