Worker program reels in mobile homeless

Paired with a blonde in their quest for golf courses near towns with a softball league, before they rode off Steve Crowe and Joan Ritten quit work, got married, then gave living aboard a motor coach a six-month trial.

They converted. They’re nomads.

Explorers.

At the Northeast Texas Community College RV Workers Camp, they’re neighbors with Mike and Robin Buck.

The couples met at “Entegra University,” an RV manufacturer’s college where new owners of million dollar RV’s learn what tools they might need if the plumbing sandwiched between floors passing over the exhaust system should need repair.

Class A RV’s are an engineered blend of automotive and home systems, the educated perspective in understanding maintenance and repair work.

“There’s not going to be a service center nearby when something breaks,” Joan said. “You expect to have to fix things.” A quick study, “Steve’s an honor student in U-Tube University.”

Over the years along the way, he’s designed and built a tow-along motorcycle shop where they keep the Harley. “We’re seventy two feet long when we’re hooked up,” she said.

In March, they celebrated a 10^th anniversary on the road.

In September, Mike and Robin Buck will mark their third year without a permanent address.

That’s United States Air Force Colonel Mike Buck, retired. For fun, he competes in “ultra races,” cross country foot races, the starting point for life on the road with Robin. She’s begun writing lately. Has a blog. Gotten a first check for a piece for a trade periodical.

She and Mike are kayakers.

“When he was in his 50’s he hooked up with guys calling themselves The Road Lizards,” she said. “They’d drive hundreds of miles to sleep in tents and run trail races.” He last raced in January – 62 miles.

He’s competed and finished in six Texas Water Safaris, a non-stop, sleep-deprived, 260 mile river race in anything that has to be rowed or paddled. He’s trimmed his time from 96 to 56 hours.

Once, he flew F 111’s, 200 feet over the desert at night, 500 miles an hour, a formation of more than a hundred planes . . .

He competes, but on the other side of the same heart that loves running 60 miles because he can, there’s more to it.

The feel of a new camp at night, friends and a fire — he wanted her along.

 

She was talking about something else when she said he’s the cream of the crop: describing his military service, and why he was repeatedly promoted, and why promotions usually mean moving.

 

Once a public school math, science and high school chemistry teacher who’d left that to home school their girls, when it came to sleeping in a tent, Robin took a stand.

“I’m too old to sleep on the ground,” she said, so they got their first RV, which paved the way to a study of RV designs concluding that if you put function and performance first, the list price is going to range from half a million up. She found there’s significant room in there for negotiation.

Home schooling had huge scheduling advantages for a family on the move and she enjoyed scheduling vacation time in off seasons.

“Spring break isn’t the time for Disney World,” she said. “But schedule it for the week before and you’ll have the run of the place.”

They haven’t owned “sticks and bricks” since selling out and leaving from San Angelo in 2018.

Their first time out after retirement, when they could go anywhere they wanted and stay as long as they wanted, enthusiasm fueled them through “the Big Five” national parks, booking three to four days at each.

The schedule for their coming spring road trip, when they’ll be pulling out of the NTCC park, books them for 10-day stays at three parks.

“On the road, there’s a rule of threes,” she said. “No more than 300 miles a day, break every three hours and stop by 3 o’clock.”

Meeting Joan and Steve at Entegra, they picked up more on the work camp lifestyle, an emerging circuit that began with the government idea of retiree Park Hosts, a useful function but one underutilizing resources.

Both Steve and Joan retired from management slots, him with telecommunications. She pulled administrative duty in the family business.

“Except for softball, the most fun we’ve had was mapping for the Bureau of Land Management,” said Joan. “We were in Wyoming, Idaho, Utah – always in back country, sometimes on roads through places as beautiful as you can imagine, and with nobody there but us.”

Compare and contrast that to the J.C. Penny warehousing gig Mike and Robin walked into out in the desert near Vegas. With full knowledge of what they were getting into, they signed up for two 12-hour shifts a week in a warehouse helping robots move freight. Pay was camp slots on Lake Meade.

The way he told it, working 12 hours in choreographed tandem with your wife moving and organizing freight is interesting, a study of logistics, time and motion.

They are lean people.

It’s the community slice, the team piece of softball in the park in a new town where nobody knows you – what’s fun for Joan – not knowing his name, whoever made up the roster put “Old Man” the first time Steve came up to bat, a title that evolved into a more affectionate reference when he jacked a shot out of their park.

He can pitch, too.

Their lifestyle matches a thing she said, maybe a motto: “You can’t stop.”

He and Colonel Buck watch for stops near golf courses.

“Always something new,” said Robin, pouring feed into cattle troughs from the back of an NTCC Ag department ATV, working as Joan’s feed hand. The old friends from University days learning how to fix RV AC moved in as neighbors this fall at NTCC

.

Prior to October, Robin’s experience with cattle was seeing them from the highway. NTCC, the emerging writer said, “is a desired location.”

Their “interview” time with Tom Ramler – the maintenance command who sold the school on the RV Park concept – “was more of a conversation,” said Mike, the pilot who has now mastered operation of two of the three models of tractors on the school farm.

He was assigned restoration of improvements to the storage quarters on the school’s dormant shooting range.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Joan and Robin have on their full cowgirl, like spirits believing they see just how an ATV might make a creek crossing they’ve been thinking about, which would save them walking the far corner of the place after they were done feeding, watching for mama cows with new calves, last protocol for morning feeding duties during calving season.

After lunch, they decided they’d re-stripe the handicapped slots on the empty Sunday afternoon parking lot.