Volunteers on vacation in Gunnison, Colo., help repair its historic structures. (Preservation Volunteers, Inc.)

When Daniel Benchimol and his girlfriend, Roxanne Magee, took a vacation last summer, they didn't choose a luxury beachside hotel or even a modest bed-and-breakfast. The young couple headed for what remains of an old mining town in rural Gothic, Colo.

There, surrounded by stunning mountain vistas in a town that in 1928 became a field research station called the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, they stayed in a 1930s cabin with only a wood-burning stove for heat and no indoor plumbing. Rather than relax, they worked between five and eight hours a day helping to restore another 1880s cabin.

"I couldn't tolerate just going to sit around on the beach," Benchimol, 24, a commercial real-estate broker and New York City resident, recalled about his two-week "preservation vacation" during the last two weeks of August. "I know a lot of people who would have run screaming as soon as they learned there was no indoor plumbing. But we had a wonderful time."

Benchimol and Magee, who booked their trip through the New York City-based Preservation Volunteers Inc., are part of a growing number of people who use their time off from "real jobs" to work on a wide range of volunteer preservation projects all over America and the world—and paying to have these experiences.

For years, volunteers have worked in National and state parks, doing everything from working in concessions to maintaining hiking trails, and many have worked on archaeological sites. But it's only in the last several years that "cultural site" volunteerism—working on historic buildings for nonprofit organizations, universities, museums and even private owners—has seen a surge in popularity, according to Allen Kay, spokesman for the Travel Industry Association of America, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that is the country's largest travel-industry trade group.

"Since Sept. 11, we've seen a real increase in historic and cultural sites overall, because when the nation is threatened, Americans like to turn back to their roots," Kay says. "Historical and cultural institutions just in the past four or five years have much more actively promoted themselves as tourist destinations. This is very much a developing segment of the travel industry."

Kay attributes the rise in volunteer vacations in part to the graying of the baby-boom generation. As a group, boomers are interested in "giving back" to society, Kay says, and now that many of them are starting to hit retirement age, they have time to do so.

Although the phenomenon of volunteer preservation vacations is still in its nascent phases in America, there is already a wide variety of trips to choose from. Whether you want to spend a lot of money or a little, stay relatively close to home or travel far away to some exotic locale, there is likely a preservation vacation out there for you. On the Internet are opportunities to work on adobe churches in Mexico or stabilize a fort and sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of St. John. These stints cost close to a thousand dollars, not including airfare. Some programs offer funding assistance or scholarships.

Benchimol says he and Magee paid less than $250 each for plane tickets to Denver and paid a $100 per-person registration fee. While on site, their housing and food was free. Of course, overseas excursions are more expensive. Preservation Volunteers also has a relationship with a Paris-based organization that offers preservation trips to and from France. Whenever possible, Preservation Volunteers Chairman Everett H. Ortner says, he tries to place participants in private homes with families to keep the trips affordable. Ortner's organization sent six people to work in Gothic this summer and hosted 10 young people from France who worked on restoration projects at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery.

Volunteers don't need special skills to go on a preservation vacation. People with experience are typically put to work doing jobs that are more technical, but any able-bodied person can spackle, paint, scrape or even tear down ailing structures. Even those who are less physically able can participate by doing research, taking photos and writing reports. Sites are usually managed by someone who can instruct volunteers, and the hours are typically not long, leaving ample opportunity to rest or explore the surrounding area.

"The work was very interesting and sufficiently laid-back," says Benchimol of his trip to Gothic, Colo. "Since we were volunteers, they weren't banging down our door if we didn't show up at the site at 7:30 a.m."

As preservation vacations become more popular, more organizations offering these trips are popping up, and each offers different projects and slightly different formats. One, the Heritage Conservation Network, based in Boulder, Colo. and started in 2001, offers "workshops," each of which is tailored to focus on a specific preservation technique, from horsehair-plaster conservation to stone, fresco and tile conservation.

Volunteers will pay to help restore the plaster walls of Orange Hall, in St. Mary's, Ga. (Orange Hall)

The plaster project at Orange Hall, a Greek revival antebellum residence in St. Mary's, Ga., is scheduled for October 2005 and costs $950 for one week for out-of-state participants and $475 for locals, which covers lodging at a bed-and-breakfast or small hotel, breakfast, and lunch as well as materials and instruction from a preservation expert. The stone, fresco and tile conservation workshop took place in April 2003 at a 17th-century stone chapel on the Italian island of Sicily. That trip cost about $900 plus airfare for two weeks, according to Heritage Conservation Network program director and co-founder Judith Broeker.

"We have many more requests [for restoration help] than we have people," Broeker says. Many private owners of historic properties are particularly interested, she says, because they typically can't get federal funding or tax credits for restoration and preservation projects, which can be very expensive.

Broeker says her workshops attract a cross-section of people: old, young, rich, poor, experienced preservationists, students who are just starting to get interested in the topic, and people who just like to work on old buildings. Although the workday tends to run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Broeker says, she doesn't hear people complaining that they have too much to do.

"We have more trouble stopping people from working," she says. "The people who go to these usually are very dedicated, and they want to work on and on. So we're dragging them away at 5:30 or 6 p.m."

Elizabeth Benjamin is a staff writer at the Albany Times-Union.

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