Our 2011 leaf reports for our neck of the woods in the western North Carolina mountains have begun! Hope you’re all enjoying autumn so far. We’ve had some rain for the past few days, but today was sunny and beautiful and we hope for more of that Carolina blue sky as fall really gets underway over the next several weeks.
It’s no secret that we’re big fans of small towns. We can rave for hours about the charming, laid back small towns near our Bed & Breakfast — Black Mountain, Montreat, Chimney Rock, Old Fort, etc. Our small towns are one of the reasons we love living here and one of the reasons people love coming to visit our area.
We’ve reached a sort of milestone with our four-year Kiva experience. Drum roll… 30 loans! For those of you unfamiliar with Kiva, it’s a non-profit organization that helps people to participate in microloans (usually $25 per lender) to small business owners who typically live in developing countries (and Kiva now allows loans to American entrepreneurs as well). Your $25 gets pooled with lenders from all over the world to fund a loan that can be hundreds or thousands of dollars. {For more about Kiva, visit www.kiva.org and for more of our experiences with Kiva, check out our previous blog posts.}
| Mountain Made gallery in the Grove Arcade (www.grovearcade.com) |
Since we love being in western North Carolina, which is full of talented people who make hand-crafted items, and being that we’re big believers in supporting our local artisans and craftspeople, we’re excited to share what will be going on in our area during American Craft Week, October 7-16, 2011.
Our latest recipe is a super easy and great-tasting fruit side for breakfast, and you can modify the fruit depending on what’s in season. For example, the photo above is our mid-summer version with strawberries, blueberries, peaches, cantaloupe and green grapes. We tend to use 4-5 different fruits in our cocktail for variety and color.You can also vary the kind of honey. We tend toward our local sweet stuff — sourwood honey — but wildflower honey and orange honey and just plain honey honey work great.
Oh, Biltmore Estate, how we love visiting you! On this most recent visit, we were enchanted by the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass traveling exhibit,Tiffany Lamps: Articles of Utility, Objects of Art, and all the things at the Estate that are just pure Biltmore.
We hope you’ll forgive our blog hiatus. We’ve been working on several upcoming projects (can’t wait to share them with you!) but we’re back now and giving you, dear blog reader, our full attention.
We spent an afternoon this week at Mt. Mitchell State Park, which is where one can escape the summer heat {OK so it was 87 degrees at the Inn, but don’t laugh, that’s hot for us} and head to cooler temps and the highest peak in the eastern United States.
This has been a rather warm summer so far for us, how about you? It got up to 88 degrees here at the Inn today! This weekend’s forecast says the high temps will be around 75, though, so until then, we’ll just hang around the pool — Pool Garden, that is. The swimming pool at the Inn was filled in several years ago, before our time as innkeepers, and is now filled with flowers and plants, which we love. Here’s some of what you’ll see blooming in the Pool Garden in July {more photos await you at our Bed & Breakfast Facebook Page}:
