Living Our Dream

Berlin, OH, Part II: Good Eats

Did we mention there are good eats in the Holmes County area around Berlin, OH? The morning after we arrived was Saturday, so we headed to Der Dutchman in nearby Walnut Creek for the breakfast buffet. As we mentioned in a couple of recent posts, Der Dutchman is part of a chain of 6 restaurants in Ohio and Indiana, and this was the third Saturday in a row that we ate at a different restaurant in the chain. The one in Walnut Creek is our favorite.

 

After breakfast, we stopped in the bakery at Der Dutchman and picked up some doughnuts for breakfast the next morning. The bakery, which had been enlarged since we were there last, has an excellent selection of pies, cakes, bread, and cookies. Items are available prepackaged on the shelves or individually from behind the counter.

Did we mention there are good eats in the area? On Monday (almost everything in the area is closed on Sunday), we made the rounds of some of our favorite places in Holmes County to stock up on some food items. Our first stop was at Walnut Creek Cheese. Walnut Creek Cheese has a lot more than cheese. In addition to a section that has kitchenware, jellies, a lunch counter and ice cream, there is a fairly large grocery store with that specializes in meats and bulk foods. The bulk foods include candy, nuts, snacks, baking and canning ingredients, and herbs and spices. In the photo below, Margery is checking her list to restock our spices. We have a test tube spice rack from the Tubular Spice Co. that is a great space saver for an RV. The bulk spices are inexpensive and are a great way to refill the tubes.

As we left Walnut Creek Cheese, we caught up to a buggy full of Amish women. With the kids in school, it looked like they found time for a girls' day out.

Our next stop was Hillcrest Orchard in Walnut Creek where Margery picked out some apples to make apple sauce. Did we mention there are lots of good eats in the area? The best part is some of them are even good for you. The next photo shows some of the 6 or 8 varieties apples available.

Since we didn't need many apples to make apple sauce for the two of us, Margery picked out a just a few.

In addition to apples, they have other produce including peppers, squash, green beans, tomatoes, pumpkins and decorative items like gourds and Indian corn.

There are a lot of good eats in the area. Did we mention that? From the orchard, we drove some of the Holmes County back roads and stopped at Winesburg Meats to pick up some beef snack sticks. The beef sticks are like a cross between Slim Jims and summer sausage.

We made one more stop on our way back to the motor home at Heini's Cheese.

In case we forgot to mention it, there are lots of good eats in the area, and there are several good cheese places. The thing we like about Heini's is they have samples of dozens of different cheeses. On summer and fall weekends, you have to wait in line to get into the showroom. Once you get in, you just shuffle your way around the displays eating cheese samples as you go.

During the week, you can watch cheese being made through glass windows. In the next photo, the stirrer on the left in the stainless steel tank is stirring cheese curds as the whey (liquid) is being drained out.

A few days later, we succumbed to temptation and made one more stop at Der Dutchman before we left. This time we went for a late lunch/early supper (lupper). Margery had chicken pot pie and Paul had a hot roast beef sandwich. We also had the salad bar.

It was probably not a good idea to spend time Berlin with all the tempting food right before to going to Pittsburgh to make our annual doctor appointments. The next week or so will be fairly hectic with a lot of poking and prodding, but we're also looking forward to spending time visiting with Lora and J. Michael. Till next time, adios.

Berlin, OH, Part I: Flea Markets

We got a relatively early start when we left the Escapade in Goshen, IN, because we had a fairly long (for us), five-hour drive to our next stop in Berlin, OH. Berlin is another place with a large Amish population, and it is one of our favorite locations. There are good eats, beautiful scenery and fun shopping in the Holmes County area around Berlin.

We pulled into Scenic Hills RV Park where we always stay when we go to Berlin a little before 3:00 PM. Scenic Hills has full hookups with 30/50 amps at every site. They have no bathhouse, so they accept fully self-contained RVs only. The sites generally have decent spacing for a private campground, although a few sites are a little closer than others.

The sites at Scenic Hills are gravel, and the roads are paved. Scenic Hills has sites on three levels. The sites on upper and lower levels have grass between them, and the ones on the middle level where the office is located are all gravel. There are a mixture of pull-throughs and back-ins on all three levels. There is also free Wi-Fi, and they have added more transmitters around the campground to improve reception since we were there last. The photo below shows our site on the lower level.

   

And the next photo shows some of the other sites on the lower level.

There is a lumber mill next to the campground. Although you can't hear the machinery inside the building, there is some noise from the dust collector, which is outside, and from the backup beepers of the fork-lifts. The mill is quiet on the weekends and in the evening, but during the week work starts at 6:00 AM. We think the sites on the lower level are quieter if we're going to be there during the week.

After breakfast on Saturday, we decided to check out a new flea market in the area. The recently-opened Walnut Creek Amish Flea Market is located a couple miles east of Der Dutchman restaurant where we like to have breakfast.

Although the flea market is mostly indoors, they have some activities going on outside, too. To the right in the photo above, they were cooking home-made potato chips in a kettle over an open fire. They also had live entertainment.

The Walnut Creek Flea Market specializes in new merchandise that includes food, country crafts and decorative items, and furniture. In the next photo, Margery is admiring the craftsmanship of an Amish-built table.

There seems to be a recurring theme of flea markets in several of our recent posts; but, as we have said many times, we enjoy looking even though we don't buy much. However, Margery did find a few more books.

There is also another flea market in the area - the Holmes County Flea Market. The Holmes County Flea Market, which has been around for a long time, used to be located about half a mile from Der Dutchman in Walnut Creek. A couple of years ago, they decided to turn the flea market building into a conference center (because of it's close proximity to the inn located adjacent to Der Dutchman), and to relocate the flea market a few miles west to Berlin where it would be closer to additional shopping. With the new Walnut Creek Flea Market now open, the Holmes County Flea Market has started calling itself the Original Holmes County Flea Market.

We couldn't go to the new flea market without going to the original one, especially since we can see the relocated Holmes County Flea Market from the campground.

The two flea markets are very similar with similar merchandise. In fact, a couple of vendors have booths in both flea markets. We escaped the second flea market without making any purchases and headed back to the motor home.

The next day, we drove about half an hour northwest to Wooster, OH, to Everything Rubbermaid to look for some new storage containers for one of our outside compartments in the motor home.

Everything Rubbermaid is a Rubbermaid outlet store that has most, if not all, the Rubbermaid consumer items plus some of the smaller commercial items on display on four floors. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find a container the right size for our storage compartment; but we did find a new trash receptacle to replace the cracked one we had under the kitchen sink, and we found a couple of small food storage containers.

In addition to flea markets and the Rubbermaid store, there is also excellent shopping in the area for Amish-built furniture, country crafts, quilts, and antiques. Since we're full-timers, we sometimes find little things we want here and there, but we usually don't shop for big items like furniture and antiques. However, we do like to eat, and there are also lots of places to get good food in Holmes County. We'll tell you about some of them in our next post.

 

Shipshewana, IN

While staying at the Elkhart County Fairgrounds in Goshen, IN, for the Escapees RV rally, we had one morning that didn't have any seminars that we were particularly interested in. That was Wednesday, and it so happens the Shipshewana Flea Market is open on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Therefore, we decided to drive about 30 minutes northeast to the town of Shipshewana to check out the flea market.

We visited this area a couple of times before, but this is the first time since we became full-timers. When we were here in the past it was always for a long weekend while we were working, and we were never here when the flea market was open. We were excited to finally be able to see the flea market.

We started out in the back row of the market, which had plants, produce and baked goods.

There was a baker who had bread, pizza crusts and focaccia. Focaccia is a flat, Italian bread usually topped with herbs and sometimes with other things like vegetables, cheese and meat. The baker had samples of several types of focaccia, and we couldn't resist buying a small piece of Mediterranean-style with herbs, egg plant and feta cheese. Margery had trouble smiling for the photo with her mouth full.

 

Not only did we finally get to see the Shipshewana Flea Market, but Wednesday is also the day they hold antique auctions in the large building adjacent to the outside market. When we first went in, it looked and sounded like total chaos. There was stuff stacked everywhere, there were people milling around, and there were 15 to 20 auctions going on at the same time. 

 

All over the building there were auctioneers standing on stools or ladders chanting, and people were shouting out bids.

As we walked around, we started to see how things were set up and that there was actually a good bit of organization behind the confusion. Apparently, those wanting to sell merchandise arrive early, unload their trucks or trailers, and make a stack. Auctioneers and potential bidders work their way down the aisles stopping at each stack until all the merchandise has been auctioned off. Potential bidders can also walk among the stacks to examine merchandise ahead of time.

We came across some interesting things like a metal soap-box-style racer. There was so much stuff and so many people it was hard to get back far enough to get a good shot of the racer, but the next photo shows Paul standing beside it.

One of the lots of merchandise included several old fire helmets that were manufactured back in the 60s and 70s by Paul's former employer MSA. In the photo below, Paul is holding a phenolic (red) and a thermoplastic (black) Topgard^® fire helmet.

We didn't bid on anything at the auction, but we ended up buying a couple of small items at the outdoor market. Paul bought some bungee cords to replace some we have that are all stretched out, and Margery got some masking tape for a craft project she learned how to do at the Escapade. We also made another pass down the aisle of baked goods and picked up some pumpkin whoopie pies.

The flea market in Shipshewana is pretty big, and we ended up skipping about a third of it because we wanted to get back to the Escapade in time for an afternoon session, and because we also wanted to stop for a late lunch on the way back.

In addition to being the RV capital of the world, this area is also Amish country, especially around Shipshewana. Our route back to Goshen took us along some back roads where we saw plenty of buggies like the one in the next photo.

We could see the buggy had a trailer; and as we caught up to it, we could see what was in the trailer. This little piggy went to market.

We passed a one-room, Amish school where the kids were outside playing softball during recess. Check out all the bikes - no school buses here.

We always enjoy seeing the well-kept farms. Many of them had laundry hanging out, and the farm in the next photo had a clothes line running from a tree behind the farm house to the peak of the barn roof. Nothing like having your gutchies (Pittsburghese for unmentionables) festooned like signal flags on a sailing ship.

We eventually made our way back to Goshen and the South Side Soda Shop and Diner, which was featured on Triple D (Diners, Drive-ins and Dives) back in 2007. It was originally a 1900s grocery store that added a soda fountain in the 1940s. It was restored in 1986 to a 1950s-style diner.

We both had a Philly cheese steak sandwich that was excellent.

South Side Diner is known for it's pies. We ogled the selection when the waitress brought the tray to our neighbors' table...

...but in the end, Paul resisted dessert, and Margery had a chocolate soda. Chocolate sodas are really hard to find, and they are Margery's favorite. This one was a little expensive (we can't see why a scoop of ice cream, a shot of chocolate syrup and a squirt of seltzer water costs almost $4), but it was one of the best she has ever had.

We made it back to the fairgrounds in time for the afternoon session we wanted to attend. The next day, there were a few more seminars in the morning followed by the closing ceremonies and a farewell picnic in the afternoon, and a dance complete with disc jockey in the evening. We skipped the dance and chilled out at the motor home instead.

The next morning, most of the rally attendees began pulling out. We got a fairly early start and headed east to Berlin, OH.

Elkhart, IN

One of the reasons we arrived two days early for the Escapees Escapade in Goshen was to have more time to get settled and to try to squeeze in a little sightseeing before the event started. While we were playing Wii with Marilyn and Alan the evening we arrived, we made plans to visit the RV Hall of Fame about 20 minutes to the north in Elkhart the following day. Elkhart is the RV capital of the world. Fifty percent of all RVs manufactured in the world come from Elkhart and the surrounding area, so it is certainly an appropriate location for the RV hall of Fame.

On the way to Elkhart, we made a slight detour to Middlebury to stop at Das Dutchman Essenhaus for the breakfast buffet.

Das Dutchman Essenhaus is a sister restaurant to Der Dutchman in Waynesville, OH, where we recently ate with Lora and J. Michael. All 6 of the restaurants in the chain have similar menus, but they have some differences, too. For example, we have eaten at 4 of the 6 restaurants, and Das Dutchman Essnehaus is the only one that has ham on the breakfast buffet. Paul loves ham, and he had three slices.

From the restaurant, we continued on to the RV Hall of Fame. The RV Hall of Fame honors influential people from the RV world, including the founders of many RV manufacturing companies and RV organizations. Bob Tiffin, founder of Tiffin Motorhomes, was inducted in 1999. Joe and Kay Peterson, founders of Escapees, were inducted in 2001.

In addition to honoring people from the RV industry, the RV Hall of Fame has a museum with 50 or 60 antique and classic RVs on display.

Their oldest RV in the museum is a 1913 Earl travel trailer. This is the oldest known travel trailer in the world. The trailer, which was restored in 1980, was custom built for a Cal Tech professor by a carriage maker.

 

Inside, there is quite a bit of storage space in the cabinets and under the dinette seats. The dining table converts to a double bed.
 

The RV Hall of Fame is preparing to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the RV industry. Although there were earlier home-built and one-of-a-kind RVs, the first factory-built RVs started to appear in 1911.

Many of the first RVs were tent trailers. They were simply a tent mounted on top of a trailer that had leaves that folded out to form a base for the tent. The photo below is a 1922 Zagelmeyer tent trailer. In this model, the top of the trailer raises up to form a hard roof for the center section of the tent much like modern tent trailers.

Being owners of a motor home, we found the early motor homes to be very interesting. The one in the next photo is a custom housecar built on a 1932 Model AA Ford chassis. When it was first discovered sitting in a barn in 1999, the engine was still in good running condition even though it had been stored for 40 years. Restoration was completed in 2003.

Although some of the early RVs had relatively nice accommodations, we saw very few with bathroom facilities. The next photo shows one of the few older RVs that had facilities. The large, white box to the right is a bathtub, and that's a chamber pot to the left.

>In the next photo, Paul is checking out a 1964 Clark Cortez motor home. The Clark Cortez, which was produced from 1961 to 1974, was the first American production front-wheel drive motor home.

Speaking of front-wheel drive motor homes, the GMC is a real classic. Built by GMC from 1973 through 1978, it is the only complete motor home ever built by a major car/truck manufacturer. The 26-foot motor home was designed with a sleek, low profile, fiberglass body. It utilized the front-wheel drive transaxle from the Oldsmobile Toranado and the Cadillac Eldorado, and it had a V-8 engine. Almost 13,000 of the GMC motor homes were produced, and it is estimated 8-9,000 are still in running condition.

Another interesting motor home was the Star Streak II. This is the second of two motor homes custom built by Paul Jones. It is on a Cadillac Eldorado chassis and was specifically designed to fit through a residential garage door.

The museum also has a housecar built on a 1931 Chevrolet chassis by Paramount Studios as an inducement to get Mae West to leave the vaudeville circuit and to go and make movies for them. It was not a camper, but a chauffeur-driven lounge car with a small hot plate stove and an ice box. It was used to transport Mae West from her home or hotel to the studio. It has a back porch where she reportedly had a rocking chair to enjoy the breezes during breaks in filming.

<>RVs sure have come a long way. They are much more comfortable, more reliable and larger than they used to be. We enjoyed seeing all the old RVs, but we were happy to go back to the conveniences of our Allegro Bay.

We were able to squeeze in a little more sightseeing while at the Escapade, so stay tuned.

Goshen, IN

After leaving Caesar Creek State Park, our next destination was the Escapees 50th Escapade in Goshen, IN. For those who aren't familiar with the Escapees RV Club, they are a group of mostly full-time RVers headquartered in Livingston, TX. The club provides a variety of invaluable services for RVers including mail forwarding and support of RVer's rights. They own several campgrounds across the country that provide low-cost camping, and they sponsor a number of co-ops where members can have an RV lot if they decide they want to stay put for all or part of the year.

The Escapees call their rallies Escapades. This is the third Escapade we have attended since we first became Escapees members when we started full-timing in 2006. The Escapades have plenty of opportunities for fellowship and fun, they have informative seminars that cover technical and lifestyle topics, and there is a market where vendors sell the latest "must-have" RV gadgets and accessories.

We left Caesar Creek on Wednesday and drove about 4 hours northwest to Auburn, IN, where we stayed at Fireside Resort. Fireside has 55 sites that consist of mostly full-hookup RV sites plus a few tent sites. The roads and the RV pads are gravel, and there is grass between the fairly-widely spaced sites. We had a 30-amp site (only 10 of the RV sites have 50 amps), but it was cool enough we didn't need to run the air conditioner. There is free Wi-Fi. The photo below shows our site at Fireside Resort.

 

The next photo shows a view down the road toward our site.

Fireside Resort is conveniently located right at an exit off I-69, but that means there is a lot of traffic noise day and night. Our site was only a couple hundred yards from the roadway, which can be seen in the above photo just beyond the end of the campground road.

From Auburn, it was a drive of only an hour and a half to the Elkhart County Fairgrounds in Goshen where the Escapade was being held. The Elkhart County Fairgrounds has several hundred full hookup campsites, and they can accommodate hundreds of additional rigs with hookups of water and electric only by running temporary, above-ground lines through their expansive parking areas. We registered for the Escapade early enough to get one of the full hookup sites. They have free Wi-Fi, but you may not be able to get it if you're in some of the outlying areas.

As with most rallies at fairgrounds, parking is tight, and the sites are mostly on grass. Electrical boxes and faucets are shared; but since you have something in common with your neighbors and there is a lot of camaraderie, the closeness doesn't seem objectionable. The photo below shows our site at the Escapade.

 

And the next photo shows the view of only a fraction of the 800 rigs at the Escapade.

 

Camping at the fairgrounds is open to the public when there isn't a rally or special event going on. There is a section toward the front of the fairgrounds that has full-hookup sites, gravel pads with a little wider spacing between the sites, and utility pedestals that are not shared.

Camping at the fairgrounds would have been nice and quiet, even with a large rally going on, if it wasn't for the train tracks which run along the entire length at the back. Fortunately, the closest crossing is pretty far down the tracks, so you can only hear the train horns when things really quiet down at night. But our site was only a couple of hundred yards from the tracks, and the locomotives really roar and the cars really rumble as they pass by, which they do with great frequency.

We opted to arrive at the Escapade two days early so we could get settled before the event started. Our friends Marylin and Alan were also attending the Escapade, and we were planning to hook up with them. We tried to arrive about the same time hoping to be parked close to each other; but we got a little bit of a late start, and we got delayed further by road construction. However, as we followed the directions of the Escapade parking crew and drove toward our site, we saw Marylin waving from in front of their rig. We ended up just down the road from their site.

After we got set up, we meandered down to their motor home and chatted for a while. We ended up sharing dinner, and we played Wii afterward. We did a little sightseeing in the area with Marylin and Alan and on our own. We'll cover those excursions in upcoming posts.

A total of about 800 rigs pulled in over the period of three days. There was an orientation meeting on Sunday followed by opening ceremonies. In the next photo, the attendees are being welcomed by Cathie Carr, who with her husband Bud, were directors of the Escapade. Cathie, who is the daughter of the founders, Kay and Joe Peterson, is also the president of the Escapees RV Club.

 

One of the things we look forward to at RV shows and rallies is the vendor area. The Escapade had several dozen vendors of RV-related merchandise set up in an indoor-outdoor market area.

 During the course of the Escapade, Paul made several rounds of the vendor area, and we made a couple of rounds together. We ended up with several new gadgets that we are hoping will make our lives easier. We bought a new squeegee and a new collapsible, oblong bucket that is wide enough to fit the squeegee. We also got new step covers that not only look good, but they will also get our shoes cleaner on our way into the rig. The covers are held on with Velcro, and can be easily be removed to hose them off.

One of the main reasons we like to go to Escapades is to attend seminars. There were a variety of topics covering RV repair and maintenance, crafts and hobbies, various travel destinations, and computers. The photo below shows the seminar we attended on cleaning your RV. This is where we learned about the collapsible bucket.

At one of the afternoon sessions, Joe and Kay Peterson told funny stories about some of the adventures they had when they were traveling. The Petersons started full-timing back in 1970, they formed the Escapees RV Club in 1978, and the club held the first Escapade in 1979. After their story-telling session, the Petersons greeted members and posed for photos.

We ran into Marylin and Alan numerous times at various seminars, as well as at the end of each day at "happy hour," which consisted of announcements, a silly skit of some sort and the awarding of daily door prizes.

Putting on an event of this magnitude is no easy task, but the Escapees have it down to a science. We thought everything ran very smoothly. To give you an idea of how much is work is involved in a large rally, the Escapees have their own semi to haul in equipment and supplies from Livingston.

It was a busy week at the Escapade, but we still found time for some sightseeing and a couple of meals out before and during the rally. Look for our next couple of posts, and we'll tell you all about it.