Our First Harvest Host Camping

We were still camping in Goliad, Texas, on Easter morning. After checking the web sites of several local churches, we settled on going to the interdenominational sunrise church service. It was held outside, at the amphitheater next to the Presidio mission/fort that we had visited earlier. As the church service started, we had a beautiful sunrise in the east. Denisa had to sneak taking a picture down our "pew" as the sky turned gold and pink.

After church, we left our camp site in Goliad and headed down the road toward a new adventure. With a record number of new RVs being sold, we are experiencing a harder time finding open camp sites. So this year we are trying a new option. We joined a group called "Harvest Host" and we are staying at our first harvest host camp site tonight.

This is the Whistling Duck Winery near Weimar,Texas. We are the only RV enjoying their pond and pasture leading up to their business.

It was a beautiful place to be for Easter Sunday afternoon!

Harvest Host is an organization that finds farms, wineries, museums, golf courses . . . any kind of business that has a large parking lot or property that would allow RVers to spend the night. The RVers pay an annual fee to get the addresses and invitations from the hosts, and agree to purchase around $20 of their products in exchange for that free night of camping.

The benefit to the host is having a new customer for their products. But some hosts are so kind that they invite wandering RVers even when they are closed. Whistling Ducks Winery is normally open on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings. They agreed to our visit on this Sunday evening, even though they were actually closed for Easter. This is our first experience, but surely not all of the host sites are this beautiful! The vineyards are in a field adjacent to the winery, and we see that tiny grapes are just beginning to form on the vines.

Even though the winery is called "Whistling Duck" we didn't hear any whistles from the resident flock of ducks on the pond. We did hear what Denisa calls duck-laughs, as they make a ha-ha-ha sound as they scoot around the water.

But we really enjoyed the duck parade as they all got in a line and made their entrance and exit from the water at the same time. They are all headed to the duck house back on the farm.

We enjoyed watching other farm fowl, like these odd-shaped guineas. These birds eat their weight in bugs as they patrolled the perimeter of the farm all day long.

But our favorite farm animals have to be the two guard dogs. They greeted us as soon as we shut off our motor home engine. We love dogs, and these two were happy to stay around as long as we were outside--and petting them.

They were too well-behaved to try to come inside the motor home, but they were always ready for us to come outside to play with them.

We've listed lots of the "pros" of this harvest host system that might seem too good to be true. So to be fair, we should also mention some cons. This site was not exactly on our way to our next destination, so we did have to drive some miles out of the way to get here. In this case, the last 2.2 miles were on a rather rough dirt road. 

Also, we have to run our generator for an hour this evening to keep our refrigerator happy, as most of the hosts have no option for electrical hook-ups. We look forward to staying at farm sites that have fresh produce or edible products that we can purchase. But since we don't drink or play golf, we will have a hard time making a purchase at some of the harvest host sites. But we've read some wineries or golf courses have restaurants where we can purchase a meal.  Also, in the heat of the summer we don't think there will be many places that it will be comfortable sleeping without air-conditioning.

Even with those "cons," we still feel pretty good about our first night of camping at a Harvest Host. It was blissfully quiet out here in the country, and the weather perfectly cooperated to give us a cool breeze all night.

We started this Easter morning watching the sunrise at a church service. Now we are counting our blessings of another good day wandering His wonders as we watch the sunset over our vineyard.