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A Homemade Green Hotel
ONLEY, VA (AP) - Maybe it’s the homemade windmills spinning on the balcony.
Or the golf-cart batteries that power the kitchen. Or maybe it’s the purple
shag carpeting, the pink shutters, the “Dick Van Dyke Show” furniture,
the leopard-print paint on the dining room floor or the gold Rolls Royce in the
gravel driveway.
Take your pick. But for plenty of reasons, the advertising slogan declaring
the Neptune Vacation Suites as “the most unique destination on the Eastern
Shore!!” might not be hyperbole after all.
Thomas “Spess” Neblett, the owner and creator of this eclectic
refuge in the quiet little town of Onley (pop. 450), says his mission is simple:
“
For the people who come here, I want them to say 20 years later, ‘Hey,
remember that fun and kooky place we stayed at on the Eastern Shore? Wasn’t
that something?!’”
He concedes the Neptune is not for everyone. There is no central air conditioning,
no hot breakfast buffets, no panoramic views. Plus, Neblett lives downstairs
with his dog, a white bichon named Billy.
“
It’s not some Victorian B&B,” he says. “It’s quirky,
retro - and that’s the point.”
Neblett himself is as colorful as his renovated home/inn/creation.
He has been a piano player for Colonial Williamsburg and aboard cruise ships,
restores antique trailer homes and resells them, owns four cars, paints, writes
music, dabbles in real estate and makes his own biodiesel fuel (called Gassux)
that he sells to local farmers, fishermen and uses himself.
More recently, Neblett has started instructing people - “for free, really,
though I hope they stay a couple nights” - on how to buy alternative
energy sources and install them in their homes and businesses. Just as he has
done at
the Neptune.
Here’s his homespun recipe for wind turbines, for example.
Buy motors intended for treadmills. Shape blades from PVC pipe. Bolt them
to a swiss-cheesy base purchased on the Internet. Wire up the makeshift turbine
atop tall steel tubes.
After that, run thin power lines down the tubes to a receiving battery and
converter box inside the house. And voila! - green energy.
At the Neptune, wind energy helps power kitchen supplies, lighting and electronics
on the first floor. All for 100 bucks or so per turbine. He has five and wants
to put up more.
“
I like to think of myself as a Renaissance man, like Thomas Jefferson,” Neblett
said during a tour recently, “but also with a dash of Mr. Greenjeans.”
He was referring to the fictional handyman/neighbor of Captain Kangaroo,
the children’s TV star of the 1960s and ‘70s.
“
I couldn’t stand Captain Kangaroo,” Neblett added, “but I
loved Mr. Greenjeans. He could do everything and anything. And was so cool!”
Neblett makes lots of references to old sit-coms, in conversation and in
business. When he first laid eyes on the Neptune in the late 1990s, then a
broken-down
apartment building, “I thought about the Shady Rest Hotel, you know, from ‘Petticoat
Junction.’”
The three suites for rent in the renovated home all have sit-com period themes.
One is called “Honey, I’m Home,” after the “I Love Lucy” show.
Another is named the “Travel Suite” and is modeled after the set
of “The Dick Van Dyke Show.”
And the third, which encompasses the entire top floor, is the “Game Show
Suite.” It includes polka dotted walls, photos and pictures of old game
shows, purple ceilings, brightly painted floors and a tall bureau signed with
faux signatures of former guests on “Hollywood Squares.”
“
Loved that show,” Neblett said. “Didn’t you?”
The town of Onley, on the seaside of Accomack County, an old railroad stop
struggling to find itself in the 21st century, was not so sure about its new
resident and
funky business when the Neptune opened in 2005.
Neblett became intrigued by green energy, in part, because of higher utility
rates and a downturn in the economy.
“
We absolutely have to get off this addiction to oil and fossil fuels,” he
said. “It’s killing us.”
So this year he started researching, and in June solar panels went up, the
wind turbines were placed on the balcony and he started brewing biodiesel from
waste
oils and grease collected from local restaurants.
Neblett pays 10 restaurants for their grease, which he then dewaters and filters
and later sells in recycled pickle barrels as Gassux.
He describes the Neptune as “the only solar- and wind-powered accommodation
on the Eastern Shore” which is partially true; his inn is partially powered
by those renewable sources, though the suites remain tied to traditional electricity.
The Neptune is not the only “green hotel” on the Eastern Shore, either.
Hoping to take advantage of increasing environmental awareness, more than a dozen
inns, hotels and bed-and-breakfasts now participate in the “Virginia Green” program,
in which they pledge to reuse, recycle and reduce, according to the Eastern
Shore of Virginia Tourism Commission.
The Neptune is not officially one of them, though.
Then again, it never was a conventional place.
Nor does it want to be.
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