Wow, A Quiet Day!!

Location: Adairsville, GA (High 53, Low 25)

Yesterday was the first day in a week that we didn’t have anything going on. It’s hard to imagine, but this time last week we were still working at Amazon. Then we had a whirlwind of crazy weather, traveling days, visiting days…and finally yesterday…a do pretty much nothing, stay in my jammies kind of day.

And it was a beautiful one. The sun was out and it warmed up to the 50s. It felt so warm after the past few cold days. With the sunshine coming in the windows, it actually got so warm in the rig that we were able to open up the door for a little while and let some fresh air in.

 

We really didn’t do much of anything…unless sitting in our chairs watching tv and taking naps count. :) We did get the grill out and Harry cooked up some burgers for our dinner. Yummy.

 

 

Here I am in my comfy jammies. Ahhh!

 

 

 

Love these kind of days…sure has been a while. We are starting to get back into the swing of retirement life.

Christmas 2013

Location: Adairsville, GA (High 47, Low 20)

Well, Christmas Day this year had it all over Christmas Day last year. Although below zero temps and Harry spending hours scrunched in the basement fixing water leaks had set the bar pretty low. ;) This year’s celebration will be much harder to top. We had an awesome day.

Although we didn’t really sleep in, we did have a pretty laidback morning. We skyped with Harry’s daughter and watched our little guy open the gifts we sent him. That was a very nice way to start the day. We then got busy making our first real breakfast in quite a while – fried potatoes, bacon, eggs over easy and toasted bagels. It was so wonderful I didn’t even think to take any pictures.

 

Later in the morning we left for my aunt’s house. I have seen my aunt a few times over the years when she made the trip north to NY to visit my mother, but this is the first time I have been to her house although she has lived in GA for about twenty years. We had a great time just hanging out and chatting.

 

 

The other great thing was getting to see my cousin Lynne.  Although we grew up together, (literally lived next door to each other), when we hit adulthood we went our separate ways and I have probably seen her only three or four times over the years since (and that was mainly at funerals).

 

 

 

Oh my, did my aunt put on a nice spread.

 

 

 

Let’s just say we didn’t go hungry.

 

 

After dinner, we  had a fun time playing Phase 10. I was playing a great game, and then Lynne managed to come from behind and squeak out the win!

It was just a great day, and we are looking forward to getting together several more times while we are here.

Reconnecting on Christmas Eve

Location: Adairsville, GA (High 39, Low 26)

 

Yesterday was a really nice day, (well other than it was COLD). I think I am finally starting to feel like things are getting back to normal. We went to a grocery store down the street from the campground and bought some real food…salad fixings…breakfast fixings…fresh veggies, and my favorite – pot roast!

 

 

Then we came home and I started a nice Christmas Eve meal cooking in the crock pot. It smelled so great.

Here is Harry ready to enjoy our first home cooked meal in quite a while.

 

We also had a nice Skype conversation with my mom and stepdad. We got caught up on news and shared Christmas well wishes. My mom made me feel better about our weather when she told me it was a balmy 17 degrees there.

Later in the afternoon we headed out to find Harry’s cousin’s house for a Christmas Eve get-together. A few weeks ago, Harry had contacted his cousins to let them know he would be in the area, and they invited us over for a little gathering they have. Harry was excited to see his cousins again, as the last time he saw them was about forty years ago.

 

 

We had a tour of their house, which was beautifully decorated for the holiday. It was a lovely evening, and we made plans to get together at least one more time while we’re here.

 

It was a very nice Christmas Eve day. :)

 

Merriest Christmas wishes to everyone! Hope you all have a wonderful day of celebration, wherever you may be. :)

Where Are We?

Location: Adairsville, GA

Brrrr! We have to keep reminding ourselves that we are really in the south, because it sure does feel a lot like HOME (AKA the cold north!!). On the positive side though, we really didn’t see any precipitation. Maybe a few (shhh!) snow flurries as we were going over the mountains yesterday, but nothing significant.

 

 

We had a great start to the morning when we met our friends Nancy and Fred Salin for breakfast at Waffle House. It was our last day hanging out with them after almost four months working together at Amazon, so it sure was sad to be going our separate ways. We are looking forward to more fun times next fall when we return to Campbellsville.

 

 

And then it was time to hit the road. It was another cloudy dreary kind of traveling day. You can see the hazy skyline of Nashville, TN off in the distance. For being a Monday, the traffic was not bad at all.

 

 

 

There were some really pretty stretches as we went along. Although the pictures would look better with some blue sky in them.

 

 

 

 

It was mid-afternoon when we crossed over the state line into Georgia.

 

 

 

Even though we were heading toward Atlanta, once again we were pleasantly surprised not to encounter much traffic.

 

 

It was around 4:30 when we arrived at our stop for the next ten days or so…Harvest Moon RV Park.

 

 

 

We have a great open pull through site. Just the way we like them. :)

 

 

It feels so nice to be settled in a new spot for a few days. AND I slept all night – until 5 am, without waking up once!! That’s more like it. :)

We are Out of Campbellsville

Location: Goodlettsville, TN (High 63, Low 42)

Well, the weather cleared up enough that we had a pretty good trip yesterday. But before that we had one more crazy stormy night in Campbellsville. The storm system hadn't sounded too bad - just thunderstorms. I kept an eye on it on the computer throughout the evening. No severe weather alerts other than wind. We headed to bed only to be awakened by the shrill sound of our weather alarm going off. Tornado warning. We had a quick discussion about our limited options. I wondered if we should drive to a store in town but Harry was worried about driving into the storm. So we elected to stay put. If a tornado had come through we would have been toast. We had nowhere to take shelter. It was super scary. We went outside and that really freaked me out too. It was almost still and we could hear the storm coming. So we just went back inside and listened as it passed over us. It was a wild storm but thankfully we had no damage. However, I am so glad that we will not be staying at this campground next year! 

Yesterday morning after our late excitement the night before, we woke to a cloudy day but no wind. We packed up and were happy to have no issues. I took some pictures but I am using blogger on my Kindle fire to write this post instead of my computer so I'm not able to include them. 

We left Campbellsville around 11:30 which seemed so weird after sitting in one place for so long. We had a really quick trip and arrived at our overnight stop at the Nashville Country RV Park. We had been hoping to be released earlier so we could spend a few days checking out Nashville but maybe next time. This morning we are having one last breakfast out with another Amazon camper couple who traveled along with us before we go our separate ways today. Then we will head out for Adairsville, GA where we will be staying until just after New Year's day. We are looking forward to having some time to relax. 

We’re Free, We’re Free!!

Location: Campbellsville, KY (High 64, Low 52)

Well, we never got that phone call, so we did end up going in yesterday for one more day of overtime. All of the campers were feeling the same as us – ready to be done! But that’s all in the past now, because as of 3 pm today we are FINISHED with our first peak season at Amazon. They told us at the closing meeting that Inbound brought in 1.8 million units during peak (150,000 above goal) and that Outbound shipped out 2.4 million units during peak week. That’s a lot of units! So I think we campers were a pretty productive part of the workforce for the past few months.

 

And now it’s time to do some relaxing!!!

 

 

Starting with… margarita time!!

 

 

 

Tomorrow morning, we head out after three and a half months here in Campbellsville, KY. We’ll be hitting the road for a short jaunt to Nashville Country RV Park, and then on to GA on Monday.

We are ready!!

Amazon Recap Part II – Best and Worst

For this installment, I will share some of our favorite and not-so-favorite things about being here in Campbellsville and working at Amazon…

Bests

• Of course, making some money which was the reason that we are here in the first place – more details to follow on that one – our last paycheck will be the first week of January, so after that I will give some details about hours worked and how much we made…
• Another great savings has been the money we’ve saved by not having to pay site fees. Amazon pays for your site two days before your starting date through the date you are released. The information they put out says they pay for one day after, but recently we got an email that clarified that and they consider that the day only, not another night. If you want to stay longer, then you just have to make arrangements with the campground to do so. They also pay for the electric, so the only cost we have had is the propane we have gone through.
• We have loved the people that we have met here. They are so welcoming. The people in the local businesses love the campers – I think we are probably a real boon to the local economy – especially to the restaurants because the campers do quite a bit of eating out. Every time we went out to eat, we could look around and pick out several tables with familiar faces. We also saw a lot of SD and TX license plates. :)
• Which brings me to another thing we loved about Campbellsville – the great restaurants! And the great prices! A couple of our favorites…a little diner like place on Main Street called Happy Days. You could have a great dinner there for about twenty bucks. And another favorite – Creekside Restaurant with their all you can eat buffet and salad bar for seven dollars each.
• We really enjoyed making friends among the other campers that were working at Amazon with us. We had a lot of fun during our shifts and towards the end, we were going out to eat pretty frequently. That’s a lot of quality time spent together. :)
• We enjoyed the rural atmosphere of Campbellsville. It has the essentials as far as stores – Walmart, Lowes, Krogers, but it really is a pretty small town. It didn’t take long to get the lay of the land. And we heard that there are a lot of nice sightseeing opportunities around from those people who had more energy and ambition on their days off than we did.
• We were lucky to find a great massage therapist, who turned out to be our lifesaver over the past three and a half months. She was really great and each time we went she did a wonderful job working out our kinks and tight muscles. Even though it was a big expense, I really believe that making that a priority went a long way to helping us come through these fifteen weeks feeling as good as we did.

A Mixed Bag

• According to people who have been here before, this has been an extremely cold fall. I put this in the mixed area because even though it’s been cold, we haven’t had any snow. And only one time did we have ice. Also, even though the nights are cold – in the twenties and thirties some times, we have had a lot of days in the forties, which seems nice to us after being up in NY previous years. It will be interesting to see what the weather is like next year.
• The campground we stayed at was also not a best or a worst. We stayed at Lakeway Campground, which was about five miles from Amazon. We did like the fact that we have a little green around us. The water, power, and sewer were good. And the owner of the campground was very nice. So those were the positives. Unfortunately, they were outweighed by the negatives….there were few amenities. There is no office or clubhouse here. We are far enough out of town that we can’t get any local channels by using our tv antenna, and there is no cable here. Since we got a lot of rain this fall, our green space turned into mud. And probably the biggest negative – the phone service sucked. We literally couldn’t make a phone call in the rig. We had to go outside and walk around trying to find a spot where the person on the other end could hear us. And it wasn’t always the same spot. When we wanted to make a phone call, we usually waited until we were in town so we didn’t have to worry about the connection. Next year we will be staying at Heartland Campground, which is right across the street from Amazon. We will be giving up the green space. But I think the positives we will get instead will be worth it.

Worsts

These are our least favorite things – in no particular order…

• The days are long. We set our alarms for 4 am so that we can have some time to wake up and drink our coffee. At 5:30 we would head out to Amazon for a 5:55 clock-in. (You can clock in anytime from five of to five after 6, but they start the morning meeting at 6 am and everyone is really expected to be there by then. So to give ourselves time to walk to the meetup area, we always punched in at the earliest time we could.) The day ends at 4:30 pm. By the time we got ourselves together and headed home, it was 5 pm. That would give us a couple hours to eat dinner, take showers and get ready to go to bed, so we could get a good night’s sleep for the next day. So basically the work portion of the week consisted of work, eating and sleeping.
• Once the overtime started, the weeks were long too. Campers at Campbellsville are only required to work the 50 hour mandatory overtime weeks; the 60s are optional. We aren’t sorry we made the decision to work the 60 hour weeks, and given the opportunity, we will probably do it again next year. But it made for a strange few weeks where basically life was work. From Friday the 15th of November through Tuesday the 3rd of December we had two days off. And one of those was Thanksgiving. So that was weird…and we really lost track of the days. We were glad when that period of time was over.
• That was really when we started eating out quite a bit, which brings me to another of my least favorite things – not having time to make real meals. I am so looking forward to going to the grocery store in a few days and buying real food, instead of frozen breaded chicken and premade mashed potatoes and mac n cheese. I haven’t peeled a potato or cut up an onion for so long I can’t even remember when the last time was.
• I think Harry minded this more than me – but punching a time clock made the list of our least favorite things. The days at Amazon are very regimented. For Inbound employees, the day starts at 6 am. First break is at 8:30 for fifteen minutes. They really don’t want you to leave early or get back late. They remind people every few weeks that the break is actually ten minutes and the other five is your walking time to get to and from the break room. That time goes by very quickly. Lunch is at 10:30 am for thirty minutes. And then the second paid fifteen minute break is at 1:30. Every day…with no changes…After a while you’re just automatically tuned in to what time it is for break and lunch.
• And then I’ll just touch briefly on this since I’ve already blogged about it – but being in the south where there is periodic more severe weather than we are used to definitely was one of our least favorite things. And being in a campground with no buildings to go to for shelter didn’t make it any easier. We’ll see how this goes next year.

So there you have it – our “Bests and Worsts” for working for Amazon in Campbellsville, KY. :)

Hopefully ONE more day to work (still waiting for that phone call)….