Senior travelers are taking tougher jobs.
We’ve all heard the news stories about Amazon’s warehouse working conditions. They’re back breaking, exhausting, unforgiving. Still, every holiday season, retired-aged RVers and vandwellers hit the road and end up at crowded Amazon camps.
A la the 2018 bestseller, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder, many seniors traveling in RVs for leisure or forced into the nomadic lifestyle due to financial stress are taking jobs at Amazon warehouses, as campground hosts, as amusement park attendants. They live and work in trailer parks and parking lots of department stores with chronically poor conditions.
These are workamping jobs.
The jobs provide RV spaces for employees where the (mostly) seniors either dry camp or hook up their RVs for water and electricity. The workers live in the RVs and other vehicles (even, sometimes, cars) in lots or at the entrances of campgrounds while they are employed.
Many of the workers I met in the Amazon camps were part of a demographic that in recent years has grown with alarming speed: downwardly mobile older Americans.
-Jessica Bruder, Nomadland
All this while the younger generations- millennials like myself- and even fresher travelers, are taking much more fun and forgiving jobs. I like to call these seasonal adventure jobs.
We (I’ve being doing these jobs for 10 years) are working in gorgeous places that often honor nature and community- places like wilderness lodges, educational camps, retreat centers, eco resorts and national parks- not parking lots. We are given staff housing, with rent below market value deducted from our paychecks. Often we’re even fed three hot, fresh-cooked meals per day. Most of the time, it’s wonderful.
What are seasonal adventure jobs?
If it’s in a beautiful place that caters to tourism, it’s a top candidate for a seasonal job. Employees are paid to live and work in the place where other people vacation. Most jobs last 3-9 months, with some year-round positions.
The most common seasonal adventure jobs available are in resort operations. There are always openings at every experience level in:
- Food & beverage
- Customer service
- Retail
- Hotel operations & housekeeping
- Tours
- Kid’s camps
- Activities (ranging from teaching classes to leading hiking trips and more)
- Maintenance
- (And lots more!)
Seasonal adventure travel is a way of living that restores the natural balance of life. It’s about being with a group of people living and working together in a community that is close to the raw power of an unspoiled land. It’s easy to reconnect with nature and human kindness.
My coworker communities have shared meals and stories around the campfire and fireplaces. We’ve lived, hiked, and explored together. We’ve painted and danced and swam together. We’ve cried together and stayed in laughing and watching movies over cocoa and hot cider on cold nights. These coworkers are my family.
Traveling as a seasonal adventure worker has allowed me to move multiple times per year for nearly a full decade. I’ve earned enough money at these jobs to completely sustain my permanent travel lifestyle. After food and housing is deducted from my paychecks, I put away the rest into savings. From this, it’s been easy to cover transportation expenses between jobs. Most of the time I haven’t had a car (though I did dabble in #vanlife) and have been able to rely on coworkers for trips to town and to trailheads for hiking.
What should you do between jobs?
Between work gigs, there may be a few weeks where a worker is unemployed. In these cases, I and many travelers I know simply stay with friends or family. But many others have saved enough to take a budget vacation, or do some free work-exchanges.
Workaway.info is the best site to find truly interesting work-exchanges around the world on a very flexible schedule. Hosts (extensively rated) provide food and housing for free in exchange for about 5 hours of work each day, with a few days off.
Life is varied as a seasonal adventure worker
At my seasonal adventure jobs, every week, sometimes every day, holds something new and magical. In the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness up in Minnesota, I woke each morning to a warm light on the lake, sky slowly pinkening, a view enchanted by Jack Frost’s artwork on the window of the private cabin my boyfriend and I were assigned by the company. If it was a day off, we’d probably toast and butter some sourdough and take out a canoe (provided by the company for free) for a quiet paddle around the bend.
If we worked, it might be our job that day to set up a guest picnic on the sandy strip of beach down by the lodge, or maybe we’d clean rooms. A few times each week I’d even teach art classes that I’d prepared, leading visitors to choose a wild plant to sketch & paint for a scientific drawing.
Earlier in my travel career I’d worked in Grand Teton National Park and been gifted with the most incredible commute: a 7-minute walk in full view of Jackson Lake and the majestic Teton mountain range in a layer of white that would take all summer to melt away. Sometimes, if I rose early enough, the lake would be a mirror and I would look upside-down under my legs and see exactly the same crystal-clear view of the mountains in the other direction.
Here I looked forward to my lunch break after teaching guests to drive boats on the marina. I’d sit with coworkers and roommates from different departments and eat a fresh salad as my panini toasted and the cheese melted just so. And always, a second cup of fresh-ground coffee.
Retreat centers offer a whole different type of work experience. In these gathering hubs of kind, open, spiritual individuals, it’s easy to feel at home. You can soak up the quiet surrounding nature, sitting by a sweat lodge on a stream or overlooking the raw power of the ocean beating a cliff by starlight.
How can you find and land a seasonal adventure job?
It’s simplest to search a travel job board like wanderjobs.com.
The easiest jobs to get as a beginner are:
- Housekeeper
- Retail
- Dishwasher
- Camp counselor
- Prep cook
- Ski lift operator (aka lifties)
You won’t find every job on a job board site. There are many more companies that don’t post on job boards than that do.
If you are searching for a job on Google, here are some keyword tips.
1. Choose a specific location.
Including a location in your search will increase your chances of getting good results. “Arizona retreat center jobs staff housing” is much better than “retreat center jobs staff housing.”
2. Choose the type of job.
“Minnesota wilderness lodge jobs staff housing” is much better than “Minnesota jobs staff housing”
3. Try variations of the term “staff housing”
You probably won’t get a huge amount of results for any particular search- but you only need one good one! If you’re not finding one, swap the term “staff housing” for “employee housing” and “room and board”.
Always, always take the time to craft a great cover letter and resume. I think that is where a lot of people block themselves from being hired: if your cover letter isn’t any good, you’ve disqualified yourself before you’ve even had a chance. Here’s a quick guide to writing a cover letter for seasonal jobs. (https://wanderjobs.com/how-to-write-a-cover-letter-for-a-seasonal-adventure-job/)
So where are the seniors?
At all of these jobs I took, there were older people. But only a few. This strange age disparity always perplexed me. The companies could really benefit from having more older people around as role models of good character. But where were the retired aged travelers?
At workamping jobs, it turns out. At Amazon warehouses and JC penny parking lots. Living in RV parks and hustling to do unpaid overtime as campground hosts. Becoming carnies and ride operators at shady B-list amusement parks. If it was much more physically or mentally trying, for some reason, a much older person would be doing it.
So what, I wondered, is the disconnect between generations? Why are senior-aged travelers guided to tough, often unpleasant jobs as workampers, but the younger generations, also sometimes living out of vehicles, is experiencing a completely different world of adventure?
I’m the creator of the seasonal adventure job site WanderJobs.com. Here, all jobs are in beautiful places that are worth going to. All jobs come with staff housing.
Thousands of traveling seniors gather at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous.
I was invited by Bob Wells to speak at the 10th anniversary of the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (RTR) in 2020, the largest gathering of RVers, vandwellers, and nomadic vehicle travelers on the planet. The expected attendance this year was 10,000 nomads. Would these different types of jobs resonate with them, or was there some reason they were clinging to the workamper jobs that I couldn’t wrap my head around?
When I spoke at RTR, many of the older generation seemed genuinely interested in the prospect of jobs that were, in my opinion, much more humane. To reconnect to people and nature. I answered dozens of questions and spoke individually to many people who told me they were glad to have the information.
“Can seniors do these jobs?” One man asked me.
Yes. I have worked with seniors in every job I’ve held. There’s nothing physically stopping seniors from doing the jobs- many aren’t too rough on the body. Certainly they seem physically tame compared to Amazon’s warehouse jobs. And seniors seem to be getting hired if they go through the same cover letter and resume editing process as everyone else.
Perhaps it was simply about reaching across the digital divide and actually talking to people in person. I hope more retired seniors are able to have access to this knowledge, so that they feel they have a choice in what jobs they take.
PSA, seniors:
Getting paid to travel doesn’t have to be painful. It should be beautiful. Try searching wanderjobs.com for seasonal adventure jobs. Also take a look at this mega-list of over 100 resources for travel jobs and volunteer experiences and other ways to travel for free!
