We left the Atlanta, GA area today, heading to Michigan. Kelly’s daughter, Stephanie, is graduating from Wayne State’s Physician Assistant program. We’re taking a bit of a diversion though, through Washington DC.

Our first stop is in Shelby, NC at Owl’s Eye Vineyard. We joined Harvest Host (www.harvesthost.com) when we got our RV, with the expectation that we would love to stay at wineries on our travels. Harvest Hosts provides lists of wineries and farms which allow RVs to boondock on their property for a night. It works well for them, as they get publicity and patrons, and it works well for the RVers as they get to wake up in a beautiful environment, and they don’t have to worry about how much wine they drink because their home is in the parking lot! We arrived at Owl’s Eye around 3:00pm and enjoyed some wine tasting. We enjoyed it so much that we bought 3 bottles of wine.

One of the nice things about staying at a winery or farm is that you are often times near quaint small towns. In this case, we were just outside the town square of Shelby, NC. We drove into town around 4:30pm, which was unfortunate because everything was starting to close and we had just missed an art fair. However, I was able to catch an art store open and found a perfect pottery gift for my daughter, Sarah, back in Atlanta.

We had dinner at Joe’s Grill and Pub serving American, Italian & Thai. As you can imagine, their menu was quite interesting. We went with the Thai theme. We shared Thai Salmon and Cashew Chicken. Both were very good.

We returned to the coach after dinner. By then the winery was closed and we had the entire lot and vineyard to ourselves. I imagine it would have been nice to break out one of our new bottles of wine and sit outside by the vineyard, but we were experiencing our first hard thunderstorm in the RV. It poured hard all night long. In the morning the sun came out and we headed to our next destination; Deer Creek RV Resort in Galax, VA.