It had been (ulp!) 17 years since I last saw Bill and Barb Castle. I’d met them in Costa Rica in 1990 and then spent several days later that year at their rustic log lodge in the Alleghany hills of southern New York state, photographing Bill’s finely-crafted log buildings. He was then one of the three main builkders of our last builders’ book, Home Work. Chris McClellan, mutual friend of me and Bill, picked me up at the Buffalo airport and we drove out to “Pollywogg Holler.”
Main lodge at Pollywogg Holler
I brought my big Canon camera along almost as an afterthought, but once we got to Bill’s I was once again fascinated by his ingenuity and craftsmanship, and I shot a bunch of photos. Bill and Barb and son Mickey run what’snow called an eco-lodge, which consists of a beautiful main lodge, a Norwegian-style log sauna, cabins in the woods and Adirondack open air sleeping shelters situated on two ponds. There’s wood-fired pizza and homemade wine and champagne, a small stage for music. No electricity. Silence so loud it’s deafening. Birds sing from sunrise to dark, and I mean a LOT of birds. (I come from bird territory.) If you live on the east coast and don’t need the $500 a day type of vacation, this is a wonderful getaway and I recommenbd it highly to my kind of people:Pollywogg Holler
