On February 19th, Xavier and I celebrated our 1st wedding anniversary by visiting Orchid Cellar Meadery & Winery for a tasting followed by a drive around Harper’s Ferry to look for cool abandoned houses and later in the evening we had an outstanding dinner at Clyde’s Tower Oaks Lodge in Germantown.
Mead is a peculiar substance that lays somewhere on the spectrum between wine and bourbon. It is made from honey and generally weighs in at around 17% alcohol. A little bit of Meade goes a long way.
Orchid Cellar Meadery & Winery charges only $7 for a general tasting and they let you keep the glass!
On the menu is an impressive selection of handcrafted Mead, wine, and honey wine. I can guarantee that you won’t be tasting anything like this anywhere else.
The honey brings a unique flavor that may seem foreign at first but it doesn’t take long to go from, “Oh, this is different.” to “Why is my glass empty?!?!”
For more information on the finer points of Mead and how it differs from wine, I highly recommend reading their FAQ page.
This wonderfully decrepit barn is just down the road from Orchid Cellar.
Venturing across the river into Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, we found several terrific specimens of abandoned house.
When I lived in New Mexico, I would never be satisfied with photographing abandoned houses from the side of the road. I would be all up in there, risking my life climbing stairs that would were barely standing and tromping over dead animals and piles of rat poo to take a good look around and to get the best photos.
In this part of the country, many of these houses are inhabited by vagrants and/or surrounded by No Trespassing signs and, more often than not, there is an overly protective neighbor within eye shot who has already written down your license plate number. Ergo, it is necessary to exhibit a bit more restraint when photographing abandoned houses in the east.
This house is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I stayed at the fence but I could totally see some awesome stuff through that broken window. Sadly, no way to get the shot from so far away.
This house, on the other hand, had no fence and was conveniently missing the front door. There was a No Trespassing sign nailed to a tree but I didn’t actually go inside and was speedy like The Flash so no photographers were shot during the creation of these images.
Everyone knows it’s bad feng shui for the front door to open onto a staircase and the maleficence oozing from the walls of this house will condensate on your face if you stand there too long. Whatever is in the room at the top of the stairs is just barely contained behind that sorry excuse for a door. Trust me, I know about these things.
Trust The Devil You Know 