A Beer Garden Worth Bending the Rules For

I know we seem like an odd pair of ducks during this pandemic, traveling while so many of our smart friends are still at home, still following safe protocol despite pandemic fatigue.

The beauty of our situation is that we travel with our home behind us, so we don’t need hotels, restaurants, or rest-stop bathrooms. We do get to explore new hiking and biking trails and get the kayaks on the water sometimes, but when it comes to contact with people, we’re still picking up groceries curb-side and keeping a safe distance from the friends and family we’re lucky enough to see along our way.

And yes, just a few posts ago I mentioned we’d been sliding every now and then by going to small breweries with outdoor spaces as part of their tasting rooms, but with the rising covid cases, we’d have to stop that.

Well … we found a safe-seeming beer garden to say adieu with. That’s how we’re thinking of it, at a least. It’s Marker 48 Brewing Co., and the beer is pretty good. Better than pretty good is their spacious outdoor seating, more like a conglomeration of variously styled rooms, each with the fourth wall opened to astro-turf lawn.

(There’s a beer garden kind of like this in Washington, D.C. called the Wunder Garten, but without the style of this place, and without its own beer.)

Of course the section we were drawn to was the converted Airstream.

It’s a 1976 Land Yacht that had been gutted and set up with beer taps, a cooler, and a cut-out large section for patrons to sit at as a bar. We had the place to ourselves (hence how safe it was) so we sat inside at the one table, where the couch would have been, and enjoyed our beers. Every window was open, the cut-out for the bar was open (that’s the view in my top photo), and fans were on. Again, we were the only ones in sight.

The bummer is that the trailer’s been restored only enough to make it usable as a bar, but heck, it’s an Airstream so it’s still awesome!

Banjo did wonder why we left our Airstream to go sit in another Airstream and spend our drinking time googling pictures of what this one looked like when it was new. What can we say: we have Airstreams in our blood.

The Rest (aka Inferior Parts) of the Beer Garden

The center of the garden is standard patio tables and chairs, but around the edges are open-sided cargo trailers converted into rooms and furnished and decorated uniquely, each with its own style. For example, there’s the antique room, the Zen room, and the Crazy Plant Lady room. We saw reserved signs on several for later that night, so I can imagine the place jumping. Glad we had it to ourselves.

HipCamp Keeps Hipping

What else have we been up to?

• stocking up on beer and coffee beans (staples!),
• teaching Banjo to avoid cacti and snakes on hikes,
• frying up soft-shelled crabs,
• cooking boiled peanuts in the instant pot, and
• visiting a pick-your-own strawberry farm.

This farm is on the land right next to where we’re camped, but we hurried through it because I had to pee! We chose rows of smaller, less-gorgeous berries that taste much sweeter than the plentiful large ones they sell wholesale, and we grabbed enough for me to try making a pie tomorrow. I have one lone pie crust in the freezer from lord-only-knows when (at least I can say it wasn’t before March when we moved into the trailer). I’ll report back on the pie.

We’ve also been prepping the trailer for the work it’ll undergo in a few weeks. We need to clear out the generous storage area under the couch so the solar installer can put new lithium batteries in there, so I’ve been finding room elsewhere in the trailer for the canned goods and bathroom/medicine cabinet stuff that’s been stored under there. We packed a lot of stuff with us initially, not knowing if the world would end while we were just starting off, and I think we can safely throw some of that stuff away now.

You guys keep on staying safe.