Arizona native Andria Metrakos Bufka found solstice and peace, along with love on the road to finding her home in Leelanau County.
Bufka conquered a lengthy career in the automotive industry, before moving to the Leelanau Peninsula and placing her roots for a quieter way of life.
Andria moved fulltime to the peninsula in 2013 and met her love, Bob Bufka, in 2014 when she needed help tilling a field. They were friends for years and then suddenly that changed, and now they have been married for four years.
As of 2024, Andria and Bob are busy restarting their garden if the deer don’t get to it first. Andria learned her gardening skills from her mother.
“She would water it and weed it and take care of it (while I was growing up),” Bufka said “When we started, it was almost all vegetables. My mom and I grew heirloom vegetables, a lot of varieties of tomatoes. We grew cucumbers and green beans and zucchini,” Andria said.
In 2013, Andria moved to the peninsula full time after leaving her career in the automotive industry. She was born in Wisconsin and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona.
As soon as she graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in business administration and purchasing, logistics management she moved to Troy, Michigan and got a job in the auto industry. That career led her to traveling around the world, moving seven times in 20 years. Bufka visited the peninsula with her girlfriend Dana Morowski for the first time in 1995.
“Seeing this area for the first time, I had never seen anything like this. I fell in love with the area,” Bufka said. “I came up a lot. I tried to come every summer. In the early days, we always camped. And then we hit a certain age where I couldn’t get anyone to camp anymore. We’d rent a place for a weekend but I’ve always loved the area. I feel really fortunate to live here.”
Andria remembers an euphoric feeling every time she started heading west on M-72.
She thanks God for her husband as he helps with all the “honey do” lists that pile up from gardening to packaging at the Red Gate Farm roadside stand located at their house.
Andria always worked as a buyer or a manager of buyers for various automotive companies. She helped with Chrysler’s merger with Mercedes to help integrate the companies.
“I’ve done strategic and operative procurement for my career. I started out working for a tier one supplier,” she said.
Bufka also worked for Mercedes in Alabama before moving to Germany where she loved living for three years. Andria even spent time at Tesla in the very early days of the startup car company.
“I worked on the Model S, and I was the global company commodity manager for the chassis. In the early days, it was so hard to get people to work with us because we were brand new,” she said. “It was way before (Tesla) went public. We were in meetings frequently with Elon Musk every week ... I’d have my clipboard and tell him about suppliers and what the costs were.”
Andria remembers people being a little afraid of Musk, but she was experienced at 40 yearsold and knew how to handle the business and pressure.
Her last job in the automotive field was with a company called Mahindra that was working on the first Indian vehicle to be produced in the U.S. based in Detroit.
“We built a new plant. It was the first new plant in the Detroit area in a long time. We worked on an off road vehicle called Roxor. I was the project manager, and it was a lot of fun,” she said. “Startups are always a ton of work, but a lot of fun. When you’re in the thick of it you don’t really know, but as you look back, once you’re gone or as things move on, you look back and realize how great it was. I’m still in touch with several people from that last position. I was very fortunate.”
Andria appreciates her time in the field as she got to see many other parts of the world. She admits being a female buyer in 1994 provided a callus she needed to be successful in the predominantly male dominated industry.
She eventually bought a place in Leelanau in 2012 as she worked for a French supplier at the time. She would come up here every weekend as a getaway. It eventually got harder and harder for her to leave.
“It started out. I’d go home at noon on Sunday and get home, do my laundry, and be ready. And it got later and later and then I was getting up at 3 a.m. to drive home on Monday,” she said.
In 2019, Andria sold her house in Rochester Hills and moved north. She remembers the white-out storms of that winter. By spring, she had help to build a farm stand that she would call Red Gate Farm.
Andria is also a recording secretary for three different townships and assists Tim Cypher with zoning tasks.
“When I’m baking or gardening I’m talking to two dogs all day. So it’s nice to talk to people and it’s nice to do something completely different. My skill set matched up with it and I love it ... This is such a small community, and it’s nice to get to know people and nice to be part of it,” Andria said.
Andria and Bob are known for the Maple City Chicken Bus in 2019. They have moved on from raising 58 chickens and are down to six with hopes of taking a break from chickens once they’ve passed naturally.
