17th Stop - Hunter's Honey Farm (IN)

Blog Post #24 - Written July 10, 2025

Stay: June 11, 2025


Megan found this awesome honey farm to stop at for a night on our way up to Michigan. Even though it was just a random stop along our route, we had so much fun!

The boys immediately grabbed their nets to "go catch some frogs" in the pond. To our surprise, they actually did! And not just frogs. They caught water snakes and turtles too, in addition to about 20 frogs. I couldn't believe how successful they were. Especially Z; Q is still working to overcome his squeamishness, but he did catch at least one! We also found a long-tailed salamander!


 

 



Meanwhile, Megan set up our hammock for the first time this trip so she could relax... You can guess how long that lasted.




The owner and beekeeper (Tracy Hunter, our Neat Person Spotlight award recipient) invited us out to watch for the Strawberry Moon. While we waited for the moon to rise, we chatted and he shared the history of his family's beekeeping. His grandfather started in 1910, then his mom took over, and now he runs it and his kids keep their own bees elsewhere (or teach beekeeping in West Africa!). They have over 1,000 hives they place and manage across the state of Indiana. I learned that they get paid by farmers to put their hives out in the farmer's fields. Many big commercial wholesalers actually require (as part of their crop purchase agreement) the farmers to have beehives on their farms for pollination. So beekeepers like Tracy actually make more money from this placement service than they do from actually harvesting and selling the honey! (Hard to believe when their little bottles of honey cost $10-20 haha!)

Anyway, we didn't end up staying up late enough to see the strawberry moon, but Tracy told us that if we hiked down to the bottom of a nearby ravine, we could find geodes in the dry creek bed. Well we're big rock hounds, so you better believe we took the kids down their the next morning before we left. I had never found a wild geode in its natural habitat before (always wanted to, just never had), so we were shocked and thrilled to find tons of them! We couldn't bring them all back with us (didn't stop the boys from trying and sneaking more in haha) we found so many. It was pretty dang neat.

And of course we had to see the pigs, pet the bunnies, see the inside of a bee hive, and buy some delicious honey (our favorite flavor was the Sassafras Infused honey, it tastes like root beer!).







 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Are We Doing This?

Image
Blog Post #1 - Written: April 20, 2025 Why Are We Doing This? Hi there, my name is Gary. My wife, Megan, and I are embarking on a 12-15 month (we think) adventure around these United States with our 3 young children: Z - 6 yo, Q - 4 yo, D - almost 2 yo. The first question people usually ask when we tell them our plans is “Why? How did you come to this [crazy] decision?” To answer that, I need to take you back in time a bit. Megan grew up in CA and I grew up in CA. We met and married in UT and then moved out here to OH for work after graduating college. We’ve lived here for 8 years, which was longer than we expected. But for good reasons! We’ve truly enjoyed our time here; my work/company/coworkers are awesome, the weather is nice (besides the gray winter), the people are good, and it’s so GREEN! Coming from the desert out west, we were blown away by the never ending forest and little rivers and streams everywhere! But all that said, for reasons I can’t fully explain (although likely du...
Read more

Final Preparations…They Almost Killed Us

Image
Blog Post #7 - Written May 3, 2025 I don't have a great selection of photos for this 'misc' post, but here's one from the de-winterization process. Not pictured is the hour I wasted trying to figure out why the outdoor kitchen sink (above) wasn't draining...only to finally realize the strainer was also a plug and even after you take it out, it drains slowly... Final Preparations…They Almost Killed Us The thing about uprooting your entire lives to become nomads and live the relaxing nomadic life is, it takes a lot of planning and work!  Our lives for the 4 months of January to April were so incredibly busy and exhausting, I felt like this trip wasn’t worth it many times.  Even before January, Megan was spending a couple hours every night researching where we wanted to go and planning routes and finding costs and details of like 700 places of interest. Mind, we’re only doing this for 12-15 months haha, so she then also spent hours paring down her list (with some input...
Read more

Choosing Our Ride - Trucks

Image
Blog Post #3 - Written April 20, 2025 Choosing Our Ride - Trucks Megan and I have never owned a truck before and our only experience driving one was driving a 26’ U-Haul truck towing our old Toyota Corolla from UT to OH in 2017. And the only time I tried backing that up I immediately jack-knifed and had to unhitch the car haha.  So when we told the RV dealer that we would buy a truck later, he understandably laughed and shook his head. But we figured, as we always do, that we’d figure it out along the way, like we always do. I talked to my boss (a big truck guy with lots of experience towing heavy boats and stuff) and a couple others and basically learned that we’d need a F-250 or bigger. They recommended we look for 3 things: Towing capacity: Our trailer has a dry weight of about 9,000 lbs, so once fully packed we estimated it would be about 11,000 lbs. So we needed something with a minimum of 12,500 lbs towing capacity to have a little breathing room. And the more breathing room ...
Read more