Our Nest on Wheels

We are members of an organization called Harvest Hosts. For a yearly fee, we get access to a list of farms, wineries, and agri-tourism sites that will allow us to park for a night on their property. There is no fee to stay, but the expectation is that we will buy some of whatever they are selling. (This is no hardship when staying at a winery.)

Our first Harvest Host visit was at the Buccia Vineyard near the little town of Conneaut, Ohio, just half a mile from Lake Erie. When we got there, I was a little disappointed. I don't know exactly what I had expected, but it wasn't parking on a stretch of grass next to a gravel driveway.


As it turns out, the visit far, far exceeded my highest expectations. It ranks high on my list of Cool Experiences in Quirky Places.

Forty-one years ago, Fred Bucci was working for AT&T* and hating his job. A coworker asked him, "If you feel like this about your job now, how do you think you'll feel in 10 years?" Fred thought about it and didn't like the answer, so he quit his job, and he and his wife, JoAnna, bought land and planted grape vines. Three years later, they had their first harvest and opened Buccia Winery, where they've been making wine ever since.

In the backyard, basically.

This is not your typical winery tour. You just wander out back and see what Fred happens to be doing. When we were there, he was cleaning the press (shown here disassembled). He showed us the other equipment as well, including an oversized plastic baseball bat that he says is perfect for dislodging clogs in the crusher.


Most of this year's crop is already in and fermenting in the blue plastic barrels you see below. When the temperature drops to freezing, Fred moves the barrels into the garage. No showy wine cellars here.


Joanna, meanwhile, staffs the tasting room and manages the bed-and-breakfast that they opened 27 years ago—in a building that Fred designed and built himself, adding to it over the years. It's totally charming: every room is different (JoAnna invited us to see them all), and each has its own patio under a grape arbor. I felt the need to sit under each arbor and enjoy the ambiance for a while.


JoAnna and Fred gave us the run of the grounds and invited us to help ourselves to grapes from the pergola outside the tasting room. Then they retired to their house on the grounds and we to our nest on wheels with a view of the vineyard.

Napa Valley winery tours are great, but give me Buccia Vineyard any day!

Photos

Did I mention we had a view of the vineyard?

Ours was not the only nest in the vineyard.

The tasting room

Enjoying my morning coffee in the vineyard

One of the guest-room patios

Another guest-room patio

Fred, the only time we saw him without a cigarette.

*At least, I think it was AT&T. It was some big, well-known company, at any rate.

by Jane (obviously)

Let me rephrase that: I can't have both a craft room and a husband in an RV. I chose to keep the husband.

And several boxes of craft supplies tucked into various available niches.

I wish my creative urge took the form of wanting to write fabulous, timely blog posts, but you already know how that's going. (I do write some excellent ones in my head.) Instead, what I want to do is make stuff.

But before I go on, let me talk about shipwrecks. There are so many of them in the waters around Door County, where we spent the month of August 2016, that they actually put them on the tourism map. Whitefish Dunes State Park even has a cool outdoor exhibit on shipwrecks. (I didn't take any photos of it, but you can see a bunch of pics and read about the exhibit on this blog about Wisconsin Historical Markers.) According to the exhibit, shipwrecks in this area were usually caused by fire (a problem not limited to the olden days, as evidenced by a recent news story), storms that capsized the ships or caused them to run aground, or—I'm not making this up—running into other ships.

When I read that sometimes debris from old shipwrecks still washes up on beaches in the area, I was all about it, as would be anyone with an overactive imagination who grew up on classics like The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe. (And yes, Gilligan's Island, a classic in its own way.) My mission was clear: find a piece of a shipwrecked ship.

And I did! Or at least, I found a piece of wood that could be from a shipwreck. (Did I mention the overactive imagination?)

Here's where the crafting part comes in. One doesn't just carry pieces of wood (even very small ones) in an RV. But neither should one simply discard a piece of wood that Might Be a Piece of a Genuine Historical Shipwreck.

To me, the answer was obvious. (As it will be to my crafting partners Sam and Sarah, who tease me about seeing all the world as a stockpile of craft supplies.) Make something with it.

I decided to incorporate my piece of Possibly Genuine Shipwreck into a shipwreck-themed necklace. (The romanticized kind of shipwreck from novels, not the real kind of shipwreck with actual bad consequences.) And I would make it with only the supplies I had on hand and whatever I could find in my beach-combing, because there were no inexpensive craft stores anywhere near us (and besides, I wasn't quite up to explaining to Steve why I was accumulating more craft stuff).

I used a sturdier-than-typical chain as an allusion to anchor chains (and because it's what I had). The piece of Possibly Genuine Shipwreck represents shipwrecks in general, but also one of the causes of shipwreck: collision with other ships. The black rock next to it, which looks like coal, represents fire as a cause of shipwreck, and the stone on the other side (it looks a little like birchbark in this shot, but it's a stone) represents running aground. They are affixed to a bit of hardware that evokes a tiller or perhaps a gear from a steam engine, suspended from a bit of rigging tied in a sailorly knot.


The shell, of course, is for the lake, and it is topped by two tiny beads (hard to see in this pic) the color of whitecaps. The white bead enclosed in a wire cage reminds me of the "bird cage" lighthouses of years gone by; there is still one on Baileys Harbor in Door County.

And the white gull feather—that's for hope, as readers of Emily Dickinson will already have surmised.

Of course, now instead of carrying around a piece of wood in the RV, I'm carrying around an entire necklace...


Picture of birdcage lighthouse: public domain https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lighthouse_lantern_room_with_Fresnel_lens.png

But we also got to go up into the steeple and see the bell (cast by Paul Revere).
Here's the view of the inside of the church.  Note that it has the traditional style box pews, which families would purchase and furnish as they saw fit.

It's always fun when you stumble upon something significant in the history of our country.  Seems that in Massachusetts you can't go very far without bumping into something that played a major role in our founding as a nation.  This week, George Whitefield.  Next week, who knows?

~Steve

We haven't had sufficient wifi to post for a while, so here's a link to the blog written by our next-door neighbors here in Maine: RV-a-Go-Go.



Completely unrelated: I am hopeful that we may find an a-Go-Go everywhere we go go. This is from Mackinaw City, MI.


And of course we have been to the Whisky-a-Go-Go in Los Angeles. This pic is from 2011. (Fans of Glenn Bulthuis and the Tonedeafs, sing with me . . .)

by Jane


I found the variety in beaches astounding in just one little stretch of Door County. Take a short tour with me, and you'll see what I mean.
The southernmost dot on this map marks the beautiful white-sand beach at Whitefish Dunes State Park—one of my favorite places to spend an afternoon. (The state of Wisconsin fondly imagines that the small rises of sand along here constitute dunes. People from Michigan know better.)


Turn the pine-covered corner pictured above, though, and instead of sand you have the rocky bluffs of Cave Point. I mean, seriously, just turn the corner—which is why the dots on the map are practically overlapping.


A few yards up the shoreline (another overlapping dot on the map), and you have a rocky beach, in this case dotted with cairns. (We went back a few days later, after a day with high waves, and all the cairns were gone. Not waves I would have liked to encounter!)


Continuing our northernward tour of the shoreline, we come to Toft Point, where the "beach" is neither sand nor bluff but consists of giant slabs of rock; if you look carefully, you can see them under the water as well as above it.


 Continuing north, we wade over to Cana Island, where the main attraction is a lighthouse, but where I was stupefied by this beach, which looks, at a distance, to be white sand, but is actually the broken shells of the villainous zebra mussel. Inches and inches deep! (Foot provided for perspective.)


The northernmost stop on our tour is Schoolhouse Beach on Washington Island, famous (if you move in certain circles) for its smooth stones. We had been told that the stones were spherical, which is not the case, but they are still pretty cool, and I lined up some of the more spherical specimans for your delectation.


I have to say, I am astounded* by the creativity in creation. I hope you enjoyed the tour!

One of the most-asked questions (of me, anyway) about our decision to go nomad was, "What will you do about books?" (The other was, "Can your marriage survive so much togetherness in such close quarters?" So, far, yes. After 37 years, you do learn a thing or two about getting along.)

I love books. I used to own a lot of books. I never counted them, but we had two floor-to-ceiling bookcases in my study, another in the living room, two more in the basement, four bookcases half that size in the family room, and another in the basement. That's not counting the children's book packed in boxes or the employee copies in my office at Tyndale.

I spent over a year and a half culling and reculling the herd. I gave books away; I sold books at Half-Price Books; I donated books to church; I left books in our pastor's office when he was on vacation and couldn't fight back; I forced books on people, possibly against their will. ("This book on the history of physical education at Calvin College? You really ought to have it.")

I even [forgive me, bibliophile purists] altered books to make journals and keepsakes out of them.

Downsizing from 3000 to 300 square feet requires drastic measures.

We kept some.

We did take some books along with us—some inside the coach proper in the bedside racks, and some (okay, two rather enormous plastic storage tubs) in the "basement" compartments below.

We have e-books.

Around 1,800 at last count. Most of these are freebies we got via Book Bub because they sounded interesting; some are good, some turn out not to be.

We use libraries.

My top picks this month

Every Day by David Levithan

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

Recommendations, Anyone?

I had this bike for six years or so.  This is the second bike that I had, as I rode a Honda 350 for around 9 years starting when I was 19.  Then I took about 25 years off from riding and got this one as my mid-life crisis bike.  I found that riding as a 50+ year-old is quite a bit different than riding as a 20-year-old.  Maybe it's the perspective that comes with age, maybe it's the wisdom of years of experience. Maybe just the busy traffic of Chicago suburbs. Whatever it was, I noticed that I was much more aware of my vulnerability and the potential for an accident as a 50+ rider than as a 20-year-old.  Fortunately, I never had a mishap, but I still decided not to press my luck, and so the bike was sold.

Today we traveled to Sturgeon Bay to do some shopping for some needed items that we can't get locally in Bailey's Harbor or Sister Bay.  Nearing Sturgeon Bay, I've noticed signs for the Wisconsin Motorcycle Memorial, and as we had time today, we decided to take a look.

The Wisconsin Motorcycle Memorial is a park and garden dedicated to motorcyclists who have died in the state.  There's a simple garden and a picnic area.  The garden path is made of paver stones, many of which have the names and dates of fallen riders.

Jane's note: