Our Most Favorite Getaway
A good friend from high school wound up building and living in a cabin in the woods, with no electricity or running water. Marshall's got a wonderful wife, Beryl and daughter Emily. We enjoy taking the van down and camping in their front yard. We like to take along something to cook outdoors. We have a portable fire pit that we drag along for the occasion. Recreational wood burning does not come natural for Marshall, who has to cut and split firewood for heat and cooking all year. We try not to burn up all of the good stuff.
To get to the cabin, we take an old logging road through the property. The road is barely improved, and their access is determined by nature. In the summer it's dry and they can drive back in. In the winter it's wet, so they walk (that includes packing in drinking water) to avoid destroying the road. Some of the tradeoffs that have to be made in the "real" world: Over-use your resources and they tend not to work for you.
An amazing thing about these roads is that the forest really likes to reclaim bare ground. Within five or so years an unused road will be completely covered and have two inch thick trees growing all over it.
We level the van out and sleep in style. It's pretty commonplace to have deer come down to look for a handout. This place is on 45 acres, mostly wooded, so there's a lot of nature around. We enjoy the quiet and looking at the stars on a clear, dark night.
Antique Stove:
The cabin's cook stove is over a hundred years old and was once owned by an old sheepherder in the area. It is the only baking oven they use. Beryl usually bakes scones on our visits. She'll produce a batch of blueberry scones after bartering for some produce at the local farmers' market. Not pictured is the extravagant propane camping stove that heats water and fries an occasional egg. (Of course a camping stove also doesn't heat up the whole house when you just want a cup of tea.)
Marshall and Beryl (Berdie) have a business that fits their lifestyle just about perfectly. They are apiarists, which means they are beekeepers. They sell honey and beeswax candles at events all over Oregon. Their booth is shown below at our local renaissance faire. Beryl is the shopkeeper on the left. Mark, from my high school year, is a cabinet maker, and I don't know who the wench on the right is ;o)
Beryl has taken the candle-making craft to a new height. She's figured out how to make candle molds to reproduce the finest detail. I consider us to be really good friends, but she sure gets tight-lipped if I ask her any specifics. She's done candles of baby ears of corn, heads of garlic and asparagus, all as realistic as can be. They also do the traditional tapers, columns, votives, floating candles - the works.
I tried to take some photos of the ones we have, but couldn't get the detail. They have a web site that shows quite a lot of their work:
Go here: www.honeystonecandles.com
No, I don't get anything from referring the site. I'm just enjoying watching my friends grow a home business out of a little shop with pretty limited resources.