Escaping the Cold & Bees

February 18, 2023

It’s 6AM and it’s 28 degrees. This isn’t cool, ok, it’s cold, but not cool. You see, water freezes at 32 and our water pipes could freeze. There are two options at this point: 1) pull the covers up over my head and go back to sleep and wait until Susan gets up to make coffee, 2) get up and see if things are broken.

You see, if she can make coffee, things aren’t broken.

Susan made coffee. Yay!

I had left the water hose hooked up over night just since I didn’t want to put it away. Fortunately, it was an expandable one and it didn’t burst. We had wonderful ham, eggs and cheese that Susan made, broke camp and drove the long way around Pocahontas State Park just to check out the sites. This is a great state park, we’ll be back. But… before we leave, we’re taking showers. We have power and water and sewer. We can take military showers on the road, but it is great having a nice long hot one. Oh, did I mention the bathroom was about 28 degrees. Brrr….

Let’s back up a bit. Some of you have asked questions. I’ll answer here just in case others have the same questions.

The Subaru looks so shiny.  Is it the backlit lighting of the sun doing that or did you get the car washed?

We had some service done on the Subaru before the trip and they washed it! Or maybe it was a $35 car wash with a free oil change. LOL.

would send….and then, theirs would add pictures of places, things they would see.  You haven’t had time for that yet

That’s exactly right, almost. It isn’t that we’ve not had time for it, but rather, the first two days were just brutal driving. It wasn’t even close to fun, all we did was drive, eat, park and drive, eat park. Not fun.

Day 3 should change that. We’re leaving the North East and all the traffic and we’re spending the night at an apiary! A apiary is where one keeps bees, yes bees! We belong to an organization called Harvest Host where farms, wineries, etc… list their locations. They let us camp free there, but of course encourage us to buy stuff at their store. We’re off to Secret Garden Bees in Linden NC.

We pulled in and the owner stopped by to say hi and told us we could could walk around the 17 acres and enjoy it all.

We can see the hives here.

Oh look, some bees.

This was in the evening and it was cold so the bees were returning to the hives. You can often see the pollen on the bee’s hind legs, nothing can be seen here, which is a shame since the red maples were flowering and earlier in the day we would have seen red pollen on their legs.

He had a large duck pond with about two dozen ducks.

We bought some honey, eggs, and muscadine grape jelly from him. Muscadine grapes are local to the area and only locals eat them. But they are good for jelly and wine. He said the wine was sweeter than a Riesling. We found some, chilled at the local Food Lion, so I had to try it. Notice the two guard dogs watching over us.

It was very red, very sweet. I won’t say I’d buy it again but I also didn’t our it down the drain. That sounds awful, it was actually pretty good, but not my cup of tea.

And here are the eggs! (He left them in the well house for us to pick up the next morning.)

Farm eggs are different from grocery store eggs. For some reason the egg producers wash them and now they must be refrigerated. Unwashed eggs still have their bloom on them and will last fine for 3 months on the kitchen counter.

Day: 203 miles,

Total: 871 miles

Miles/Day: 290.3