Corinne CrawfordI was making my way to Edinburgh to do my first “workaway”. Workaway is a program where people that have work that needs to be done on their property trade the work hours for a place to stay. There is a whole website dedicated to matching travelers to hosts and it ranges from childcare to sheep tending and everything in between. I applied to one that was restoring an old military bunker into a tourist attraction right outside of Edinburgh. The details were pretty sketchy and even after talking to the host on the phone, I still wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into but this particular workaway required 20 hours of labor a week in exchange for a bed of some kind, it really was a bit unclear. But the work hours were flexible and the UK is very expensive so I had to find a way to cut costs while I was here so I thought I would give it a try. I arrived in the evening and rang the bell on the big iron gates as instructed and waited until another volunteer let me in and showed me to my room, which I was sharing with another volunteer. And then he took me for a little tour in the bunker. After descending a tunnel, this place opened up into countless rooms on three different levels. Surely it would not be hard to get lost in there. And for sure there were ghosts.
The site was interesting and very much a work in progress. The accommodations were interesting as well. There were two buildings that were like construction trailer-type bunkhouses, one being quite large with a full kitchen, living room, bathroom and then three bedrooms. The trailer where I was staying just had two rooms and a bathroom. There were also 3 “caravans”, or what we would call mobile homes on the site although they were only hooked up to electricity, not water or gas so you couldn’t use the kitchen or the bathrooms in the caravans. When I arrived all of the caravans were full, not with other workaway volunteers, but with comedians. Let me explain. During the month of August, Edinburgh is home to the original Fringe Festival, a month of performance art, comedy and theater. One of the volunteers that had been staying at this workaway for a while is from Los Angeles and were friends with a comedy troupe called Alphabet Soup. All accommodations are ridiculously expensive during August due to all of the festivals being held in and around the city so it was arranged that the owner of the property here would get several caravans, and the comedians could stay here for a much lower price than anywhere else and then the owner, Ben, would have more room for more volunteers after August. They all left two days after I arrived and one of my first tasks here was to clean out all of the caravans, launder the linens and remake all of the beds ready for more volunteers. I took the opportunity to claim one of the caravan rooms as it was private and a double bed with a place to work in the living room. So from then on, part of my tasks would include cleaning in general all of the common areas and getting new bedding ready when one volunteer left and another was coming. When I first arrived, there were just 6 volunteers but within a week, it doubled and the work was pretty dirty so the two bathrooms, kitchen and common room were in constant need of cleaning. I didn’t mind the work. I ended up with a pretty bad cold for the first week I was here, I am blaming it on all of the germs I encountered cleaning. Some of my other tasks included power washing the top of a storage container so they can put solar panels up there, clearing brush from an outdoor path and stairs, moving equipment and tools from one room in the bunker to the other and scraping and grinding old paint off the brick and cement walls and ceiling and repainting the entire room again with white paint. Other volunteers did things like major clearing of trees and shrubs, framing doors, painting other rooms, preparing the solar panels, and many other small and large tasks.
There is a lot of work to do here to turn it into a tourist attraction but Ben has started giving tours on Saturdays just to get a buzz going and to show the progress of the restoration. Ben is a super nice guy whose family owns the land and has already renovated another bunker about an hour away from Edinburgh that now sees about 200 visitors a day. He has his own plastering business as well but he does stop by almost every day and directs work or bring supplies and tools but the majority of the time, it is just the volunteers here. It is like living in a little commune. Everyone so far has been absolutely lovely with people from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, The Netherlands, England, Germany and a few from the US.
Some people stay for months, some just for two weeks. I was a two-weeker. Ben couldn’t really take on many volunteers during August because of the comedians being here but once they left, he pretty much just said yes to everyone and as we all tried to figure out who was going to sleep where and to keep the shared accommodations single gender, it looked like we were going to run out of room. So I offered to help Ben with the logistics and planning and I created a spreadsheet and figured out who was going to go where and when. I love a spreadsheet and that sort of task so it was right up my alley. Turns out we were not going to run out of room and I called my spreadsheet “Bunker Bed Bingo”.
