Harvey goes to Texas … with friends

Day 5 – Crown Hill Winery, Luchenbach, Kerrville & beyond

Today was so action packed that you may want to take a break midway and read the rest tomorrow. I’m tired just thinking about it. But such a FUN day with lots of spontaneous treats from God scattered throughout. Also I should mention that the pictures in this blog are best viewed on a laptop. I noticed that sometimes they get cut off or covered up by the comments on a cell phone.

Traci’s daughter & son-in-law, Becky & Robert opened a winery fairly close to where we were staying. So of course we had to go see it. I did not realize that Texas was such wine country. There were wineries everywhere. Also quite a few craft breweries and a few whiskey distilleries thrown in. So choose your poison.

Although Becky & Robert both have other full time jobs and a new baby, they bought this amazing property, had the barn redone into their main building and tasting room and opened Crown Hill Winery. We had a little wine tasting and then Becky took us over to see their house. The previous owners had the fruits of the spirit carved into some of the stones. How cool is that? They also have a smaller house where their caretaker lives, that was built in the 1800s. In the future they plan to build a production facility (currently their wine is made in another location) and plant grapes. They may even use their property as a venue for weddings and things.

On the way to Crown Hill we had seen a sign for chocolate tasting. Yes! Sign me up!! When we mentioned it to Becky she said that next door to the chocolate place was an ice cream store that made their ice cream from water buffalo milk. What kind of alternate universe had we entered into? We stopped there next. Because when you’ve just done a wine tasting at 11:30 AM, the next step is naturally chocolate and then ice cream. The guy at the counter, James, gave us each a little baggie of various chocolates and instructed us to go into the other room where we could watch a video about their chocolate being made in Venezuela and hear about each chocolate we tasted. Our little chocolate taste bag included white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, a spicy chocolate covered cashew, pistachio bark and a spicy chocolate truffle. We learned that their chocolate is made from cacao seeds which are found inside a plant called mazorca. The meat of the mazorca plant does not taste like chocolate at all, but similar to lemonade. The farmers scrape out the fruit with the seeds still in it. Then they take it to a processing place where it is layered between banana leaves in a wooden vat and left to ferment for about a week. When the fruit is fermented, the beans that are now left, are spread out in the sun to dry for several days. Once dried, the beans are taken to their factory in Barquisimeto, Venezuela where they are roasted, winnowed & ground up. Fascinating! But don’t ask any of the others about it because they all rushed back to taste more chocolate while I was getting educated. It’s always amazing to me that people discovered delicious tasting parts of plants that otherwise didn’t taste good at all. Back in the showroom we were given samples of several flavors of chocolate bark, toffee, truffles and fudge. They had lots of unusual flavors including a key lime fudge and chipotle almond bark. James would say, “would you like to try …?” We never said “no”.

Once we loaded up on chocolate we headed next door to the ice cream place. When we noticed that they also sold a few pre-made sandwiches, we decided that maybe lunch would be a nice intermission before we hit the ice cream. Since we didn’t want to get too full of anything remotely healthy, Bruce & I split a sandwich and Mary & Stew split a sandwich. We ate out back near the water buffalo pen where Pearl, Peaches and Patience, the baby water buffalos, munched on grass. There was water buffalo food (which looked very similar to the grain my horses used to eat) that we could hand feed them. The actual water buffalo herd whose milk is used for this ice cream are kept some place else in southern Texas. After washing our hands very thoroughly, we went in for the grand finale. Of course we tasted all the flavors since that seemed to be the theme of the day. The guy offered to make our scoops half & half because they were all so deliciously creamy and we were having trouble deciding. Mary got pistachio and citrus cream. I got chocolate (because can you ever have too much?) and coffee. I don’t remember what Stew got. Bruce got straight coffee. When he ordered it, he said, “I’d like a large cup of coffee” which actually was the totally appropriate way to order it. You know – large, not medium; cup, not cone; coffee flavor. But it threw the counter guy for a sec. He got a funny look on his face (like “what the heck, I’m trying to serve you ice cream not coffee!”) and asked, “would you like cream or sugar with that?”

A guy on a blog I like (called Crazy God Stories) talked about this giant cross in Kerrville which was in the same area. We headed there next. The garden had lots of different statues along with the giant cross. It also had a place that you could write prayer requests on rocks and leave them in the garden to be prayed for.

After Kerrville we headed to Luckenbach, and yes, we all had the song stuck in our heads, even though our GPS was convinced it was pronounced luck-in-batch. I assumed Luckenbach was just another cute small town in Texas. I had no idea HOW small. It was basically a post office, a general store, a town hall and one house. All the paraphernalia says: Luckenbach, TX population 3 because there was a family of 3 people living in the house when the town was bought by a guy named Hondo Crouch in the 70s. Apparently he was quite a character. He made himself mayor and put on all kinds of festivals and celebrations. His motto was, “Everybody’s somebody in Luckenbach”. It is now a music venue with a few tourist shops. I think they still do weddings and events in the old Town Hall. I wonder if anyone would have ever heard of it if it wasn’t for Waylon’s song or Willie’s 4th of July shows there. We sat for a while listening to the people taking turns singing on the stage. It was really hard to hear them because they were not mic’d and some people behind us kept talking through the whole thing. I did however find a new purse.

By this time we were getting hungry again. We had been given several suggestions in the last couple of days for restaurants. We decided to try the Pecan Street Brewery in Johnson City because it was kinda on the way home. We went in and were seated at the front. The bathrooms were being remodeled so Stew had to go to the back to get to the ones upstairs. He told us there was live music and dancing in the back. When we asked the hostess if we could move, she said that there are about 50 people who reserve seats back there every Sunday when this band plays, so there probably wouldn’t be any tables. But she checked anyway. And lo and behold there was one table left, which we snatched up immediately. It was so fun to sit back there and listen to this band play songs we knew and watch these older people (I try to be more careful with that description these days since I am quickly joining the ranks. I usually go with the definition: if you are older than me, you are old. If you are younger than me, you are young) two stepping and tearing it up on the dance floor. You could tell they mostly all knew each other well and had been dancing together for a long time. The band quit playing and everything shut down at 9:00 so we headed home.