Our house sitter, Zach, and his Olaf.

The snowpocalypse brought us a foot of snow.  It was greatly novel to open the door and see the world completely covered in white.

It looks as though we may have survived the worst of winter.  While we still dip into single digits, it is happening a little less.  And little signs of life are popping up all around us.  We have what look to be daffodil shoots popping up all around the property.  And in the melt off from the snow, we have frog eggs!  It’s been amazing to watch the little black dots turn into tadpoles.

Boy are these guys going to noisy one day…

Enjoying our warmer weather, we thought we’d wander out onto the Parkway and take advantage of one of the multitude of hiking trails to be found.  We thought that we’d do the loop around Price Lake.  We’d seen it driving by a few times.  So we parked, and headed off down the trail.

Is this the trail to . . . . .?

After setting off, it was a beautiful hike, but we wandered for a while without seeing the water.  We were getting a little bit worried.  We didn’t bring any warm clothing, and forgot our ‘rescue me, I’ve never heard of GPS’ whistles.

Someone lit a fire for warmth that went terribly, terribly wrong. . . .

Finally we happened across some other people (we felt like wimps, they had a stroller), and asked if we were on the right path to the lake.  They assured us we were.  Finally, two miles later, we broke into the clearing right next to Pric. . . . . wait a minute…….

That’s not Price Lake!

So, we didn’t make it to Price Lake.  Turns out that’s a little farther up the Parkway.  Ah, well.  So we make the circuit around Bass Lake and enjoyed the day.

At least I remembered the bright clothing in case we got lost.

We were having a grand ole time, until we realized that we could see where we parked the car.

Hey, that’s where we parked! . . . . . . Oh man.

That’s right.  All the way back up  the hill to Cone Manor where we parked.  2 miles back up, and I had 15,000 steps registered on my fitbit.

2 weekends in a row of great weather seemed almost too much to hope for, but we were blessed, and so we headed off to Charlotte the following weekend to attend a *cough, cough* Arizona State *cough, cough* alumni event to tour a rum distillery.

Muddy River Barrels!

Muddy River Distillery was a great experience, and a pretty inspiring story.  It’s run by a husband and wife and is slowly making inroads in North and South Carolina.  We of course had a tasting…

Robbie and Caroline pouring our rum. . . .

We also learned why moonshining is illegal.  Apparently your first few bottles out of the distiller are poisonous.  In unrelated news, we’re sending moonshine to everyone for their birthday!

Welcome to the local liquor store!

Hope everyone got out to the Festival of Books!  Until next time . . . *hiccup*