Here’s a news flash – work is NOT interesting, at least, not always. And I’ve been doing a lot of it lately, so I haven’t always had interesting things to write. or at least, not the most interesting to write about here… But today, work took me to one of the most gorgeous spots in the area. I was asked to write about the National Forest. When I talked to one of the foresters I know and like, he mentioned the former Caywood Point Boy Scout camp, which has been taken over by the National Forest. This summer they improved the roads and sort of created a new one. I hadn’t been down there for about 20 years, and Bill said he’d go with me. It was like walking through a piece of heaven.


This is the old “Queen’s Castle” – it was a small, private summer camp for a group of women who came here every year to live in tents in the woods and talk about voting rights for women and other intellectual stuff of interest to ladies… Camping here is currently free, because they haven’t gotten around to “formulating policy” yet – in other words, they were thinking about building the roads and haven’t yet made rules.

If the roof line of the building - and it's really a very, very tiny cottage to be called anything so grand as a castle - looks familiar, it's because one of the small wineries, Shalestone (that's not the one Uncle Andrew worked for but a different one closer to Lodi) copied it for their building.