The Los Angeles Times reviews a book about the so-called Airstream lifestyle of RVing. It uses that review as a springboard to a discussion of people living full-time in RVs of various descriptions - mostly not Airstreams.
The biases of author Ellie Robins become clear immediately as she unloads on the perfidy of RV marketing folks. She finds little to admire in full-time RVing, whereas I write to take exception to certain of her sweeping generalizations.
She criticizes "workamping" which is often working 20 hours a week in return for a free place to park your RV plus utilities which RVers call "hookups." N.B., To RVers, hookups refer to water, electricity, sewer and sometimes cable TV connections, not to casual sex.
Please be clear, which author Robins apparently is not, workamping isn't meant to be a full-time income to support a person or a couple. It is relatively low skill work and pays not much.
Workamping is meant to supplement a retirement income and provide structure to fill some part of a retiree's days. It is especially useful for people who never developed hobbies, who can't think what to do with themselves all day long without a job to go to.
Workamping replaces the pre-retirement workplace as a source of human contact - it's a place to go, people with whom to talk, and a reason to get out of bed and get going. For those using it for its intended purpose - for retirees who own an RV - it works fine and takes much of the sting out of paying for a place to live.
Workampers I've known have mowed lawns, raked leaves, registered campers, inspected watercraft, clerked in stores, emptied trash, cleaned restrooms, and kept an eye on things. I knew one whose job was exterminating a plague of ground squirrels - cute little guys but very destructive to landscaping.
The DrsC have never workamped but have talked to a number of folks who've loved it. It isn't intended to be a living wage; those who try to make it so are one catastrophic financial event (a blown transmission, for example) or health emergency away from homelessness, as the article points out.
For the at-loose-ends RV-owning senior with some retirement income plus Social Security, and Medicare, workamping is great for the healthy years between the end of a career and the onset of physical and/or mental frailty at the end of life. That's all it ever pretended to be.
Most happy workampers like "having something to do" as they've spent a life being busy. They honestly are not prepared to productively use the idleness that, for example, has enabled me to research and write this blog for the last 11 years, an obvious labor of love.
