April 27, 2013
Wednesday night the rain started again.
Thursday morning was overcast and we decided to move up the Neuse
River 40+ miles to a new campground. Greg found a listing for the
Neuseway Nature Park, a county park in middle-of-nowhere Kinston,
North Carolina. It's $12 a night for full hook-ups and free wifi.
Wow! Cheap, what's the catch? There is only one bathroom (one toilet
for each gender) for the whole campground and nature
center/park/picnic grounds, and the shower is in it. So we are going
to try out the RV shower again, instead of locking everyone in the
whole park out of the only bathroom for our showers! Otherwise, we
have a nice site across from the river and in the trees. Every hour
from across the river the church bells chime and several times a day
they also chime hymns.
When we arrived, we discovered that we
had to go into the Nature Center to register. Crazy little rural zoo
of sorts. There were cages with snakes everywhere. Some indigenous,
some not. They keep the local taxidermist busy. There are stuffed
critters everywhere. Same as the snakes. Some local, some not. Then
there are live critters as well. Oliver the tropical bird has the
only open fronted exhibit, so I'm guessing his wings are clipped.
According to his sign, he craves attention, (duh...the bird is
bored!), and likes you to sing “Happy Birthday” to him. I
declined, but did talk to him a bit. There was a tankful of crabs,
and several exhibits of furry things. The Prairie Dog broke my heart.
He was all alone and came over and scratched the plexiglass with, I
swear a look of utter desperation and loneliness on his face. He had
no colony, just a lone animal. At that point I told Greg we had to
leave the building. I couldn't stand to be there. I won't go on about
small zoos and animal rights issues. Suffice it to say, I was
concerned.
Friday morning, with sunshine again
(these coastal clouds that drift in and spit rain are driving me
crazy!), Greg walked the highway bridge over the Neuse River to
Kinston. He came back with an appointment- a 3 pm tour of the Mother
Earth Brewery across the river from us. Greg had sampled their
Sisters of the Moon IPA at a restaurant in Ocracoke. They just
started three years ago and only distribute in North Carolina,
Georgia, and DC. We forgot that the brewery was in Kinston, because
we hadn't expected to find ourselves here!
So about 2:30 we wandered over to
Kinston with a plan to tour the brewery, go to their Taproom that
opened at 4 pm, and then find a place for dinner. All within
reasonable walking distance of the campground. We toured the brewery
with a young hipster couple from Raleigh. The young man was a
bartender and serves the beer where he works. Mother Earth Brewery is
the only LEED gold certified brewery in the country. They bought up a
block of old buildings in the dying downtown of Kinston and re-habbed
them using green techniques. Everything they could they reused;
floorboards, etc. Then they installed solar panels, side and rooftop
gardens for vegetables and hops, and a huge rainwater collection
tank. They salvaged an old local playground slide and installed it to
slide down from the corporate offices upstairs. A bunch of the
employees skateboard and bike to work.
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| Tank Room |
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| Fermentation Tanks |
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| Finishing Tanks |
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| Bottling Machine |
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| Employee Skateboard Parking |
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| Recycled Playground Slide and Fire Escape |
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| Distilling Equipment |
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| Barrels for Aging Special Fruit Beers |
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| Distilling Experiments in Glass Jugs |
The owner is originally from Kinston
and currently runs a 8,000 employee company. The brewery is his
passion. He has also started nearby, a music venue/jazz club, and a
restaurant is getting ready to open, that will use the food grown in
the brewery gardens. In addition to the beer, and the specialty beers
they brew, that have a higher alcohol content and are seasonally
produced with fruit and hops, they are experimenting in order to
start a distillery on the premises. It will produce gin, rum, grappa,
and whatever else they get interested in. In the building is The
Taproom which serves their products. It has a trendy, big city vibe,
and an adjoining beer garden for warmer weather.
They have a mission to do brew as
sustainably as possible. When they can, for the type of beer being
brewed, they use hops from the US, but certain types of beer, because
of their definition have to use imported hops. In order to compete in
contests, they need to use the proper ingredients for that category
of beer. Their spent hops go to local farmers for their cattle. Most
of their beer is bottled, but they are transitioning to cans. In a
can the beer is not exposed to light, so it stays fresh longer. Also,
cans can be recycled everywhere, but bottles are not. Previously,
they had to wait for a beer to become more popular in order to
justify the cost of having a lot of cans printed with the label. Now
they have a machine that will put a sleeve on the can, so that they
can switch out types easily. They have just found a sleeve that is
biodegradable, so they will be starting to use cans more.
Long story short, the tour was
interesting, but we finished up before the Taproom opened, so we
walked around the deserted downtown. Not much else around, typical of
a small town that has lost most of it's downtown retail. We had
already discovered that there was only one restaurant close by, so we
walked over to see if we could make reservations. We looked up The
Chef and The Farmer on line and decided it looked interesting, but a
little pricey, but we knew we wanted dinner right after sampling
beers and not after a walk back to the rig, so we got a reservation.
We went back to the Taproom as a few
locals wandered in. We got a chance to sample and then try several of
their beers. We tried the Dark Cloud Munich-Style Dunkel Lager, that
had just won a bronze medal at a big competition, 2012 and 2013
Tripel Overhead Barrel-aged Belgian Tripel, Second Wind Pale Ale, and
Nitro Batch No. 533 German Pale Ale. Whew! Time for dinner!
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| Tap Room |
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| Beer Garden |
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| LEED Gold Award |
The Chef and The Farmer turned out to
be one of the best meals we have ever had! It beat out Volt back home
in Frederick. (Volt is owned by the Voltaggio brother who lost first
place to his other brother on Top Chef.) The chef/owner is a two time
finalist in the James Beard competitions, and chose to open up a
restaurant in Kinston??? She sources local food and provides a very
upscale dining experience. Of course, we came wandering in dressed in
jeans, walking shoes and Greg had on his maroon t-shirt with a
chemical representaion of capsicum (hot peppers) on it! The guy who
gave us the tour of the brewery assured us we were dressed fine for
Eastern Carolina!
After an hour and a half at the
Taproom, we decided to pass on drinks before dinner, (seriously...we
didn't have a designated walker). Greg visited the restroom first and
informed me that they had washcloths to dry your hands with and he
had just washed his face. What??? He said no one else was in there
and the sunscreen was grimey, so, I can't take him anywhere. We got a
good laugh out of it. Traveling is really loosening Greg up...good!
Back to the meal- we started with a fresh asparagus salad. Perfect
choice since the asparagus have just come up here. Then Greg had the
New York strip steak and I had the Pork Surprise. The chef sources a
local pig and makes bacon, sausages and roasts out of it. The dish
had all of them in it with an amazing sauce tasting of coriander, and
very small dumplings and thin strips of greens. We couldn't resist
the in house made deserts. Greg had a sort of pecan pie/cake with
chocolate and bourbon ice cream with a citrus sauce, and I had a
lemon coconut meringue cake with fresh picked first of the season
strawberries. Back to my diet today, but the splurge was SO worth it.
We waddled back to the rig for the night.
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| Nicer than Campground Bathroom! |
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| Outdoor Herb Garden |
Today, the sun is still shining. We are
keeping our fingers crossed! Greg walked back to town to the hardware
store. He needed a hardware fix. Gotta' keep him happy. On the way he
found a farmer's market, so we now have fresh picked spinach, turnip
greens, small red onions, and...asparagus!!! It really is only good
if it has just been picked, and this is, so I am very excited to cook
it for dinner. It won't be prepared like last night's, but after that
meal, simple is better!
We have two more nights here, and then
I think we'll start to head north. (Yay!!!!!)
