Employed again, with better pay

©2011 Lydia Hinshaw

Our new place of employment

 WEST GLACIER, MT --  On our way to a hike in Glacier National Park Thursday, Prince Charming and I decided to stop in at the shuttle transportation center and see if there might be driving jobs available.
 Within the hour we had a campsite to live in for the next two months, and were on our way to Kalispell to fill out the usual pre-employment raft of paperwork and take the usual drug test.  Friday we went through six hours of orientation and got our uniforms.  And if we can complete some training after the Fourth, we will have jobs until Labor Day, making nearly two dollars more per hour than we were earning at Yellowstone.
 We will be driving 2000s generation Sprinter vans up and down Going to the Sun Road, which is gorgeous but can be harrowing because it is quite narrow.
 Glacier is my favorite U.S. National Park.  I worked on the east side of the park in the summer of 2005, and loved the scenery and the hiking, although my employer-provided housing was in the middle of party-central and I occasionally wound up spending nights in my car in order to get any sleep at all.
 I had been interested in driving shuttles here for several years, but had been unable to find a way to apply for the jobs from Florida.  In person, it was easy.
 We will be both living and commuting in the Magic Bus for the next two months.  The campground, which is the same one I stayed at multiple times on bicycle trips in the 1990s, is pleasant, well-run and just 2.5 miles from work.
 We are only about 30 miles from both a Walmart and a Safeway, which is a record for any of our summer jobs over the past six years.  As a rule, we've been at least 80 miles from decent shopping, and more often 100-miles plus.
 So things have worked out for us.  The season is short here, July 1 to Labor Day, so we'll still have plenty of time to travel at the end of the season before returning to Florida.
 It is almost too good to be true.