Marywinne Sherwood of Northern Carolina has taken many memorable trips. She’s bicycled across Scotland and walked across England from St. Bedes to X. But one of her favorite vacations was one she took much closer to home.

“I was in a team assigned to build steps off the Virginia creeper trail, named after a railroad that used to climb the mountain circuitously carrying logs in the last century. Now they’ve turned it into trails. The landscape is beautiful — waterfalls, rivers, trees, hemlock. There are bridges that cross over the rivers and trees, and we were assigned to build steps. They use rebarring cement, and have this big sledgehammer and huge drill and we would hammer the rebar down. Everyone cheered each other on… It’s so gratifying to look back and see what we built and know people will enjoy walking down to the rivers edge to go fishing and have a picnic.”

Marywinne took part in a Sierra Club Service vacation, in conjunction with the National Forest Service. She’d done one before in the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area in southern Virginia. She did trail maintenance, which means walking along the trails and cutting back the brush or building up slopes where trails have eroded. She’d also done one in Maui, “but I was disappointed because most of it was touring.” Yes, you have to be a special kind of person to prefer sleeping in shared, unheated cabins in the forest and be willing to do heavy manual labor, come rain or shine. But 65 year old Marywinne says it’s absolutely worth it. “It’s so gratifying to look back and see what you’ve done, knowing that you’ve added something to make a place enjoyable, not to mention the camaraderie of the group. The Sierra Club has special people who love the land and appreciate the environment . At night people sit around the campfire and sing songs — it’s like Camp, which as a child, I loved.”

Marywinne doesn’t do service vacations because they’re cheap. She does them because she loves bonding with other people, and making a difference. You have to want to do this kind of work. But if you love being outdoors and enjoy this kind of environment, service vacations through the Sierra Club and the American Hiking Society are an ideal way of having an affordable vacation.

There are other kinds of service vacations too, ones that might be less strenuous, but just as important. Global Volunteers links volunteers to 150 teams in 19 countries doing everything from community work to teaching English. Amizade organizes housing, environmental and healthcare projects in 10 countries.

Comments are closed.