Small but definitely not lost in a crowd, the Downy Woodpecker is our February 2014 feature in the 12 Months of Birding at the Inn series on our blog. The Downy Woodpecker is black and white, with a splotchy or checkered-looking pattern on its wings, a white stripe down its back, and a black-and-white striped head. Males have a red patch on the backs of their heads.
The 11th annual Dine To Be Kind event, where participating local restaurants donate a portion of their sales (including take-out and bar tab) to the Asheville Humane Society and its Animal Compassion Network Department, will take place Tuesday, March 4, 2014. Just another reason to support our local restaurants, coffee shops and taverns – they are awesome supporters of lifesaving programs for pets-in-need. Have we mentioned how much we love living in an area that loves animals?
We’re installing a new garden this year at the Inn on Mill Creek, the Guest Favorites Garden. Can you guess what’s in it? That’s right, favorite plants and flowers of our guests, which we gathered from surveying them on Facebook.
| White Chocolate Chip Cookies with Cherries from the Inn on Mill Creek |
We tweaked a recipe we had for soft chocolate chip cookies, cutting some of the sugar and substituting white chocolate chips for milk chocolate, then adding dried cherries. Hello, cookie goodness. Here’s the recipe…let us know what you think!
Since 2012, we have had exactly two inches of snow accumulation at the Inn on Mill Creek inside Pisgah National Forest outside of Black Mountain, NC. We’ve enjoyed seeing snow on the peaks at higher elevations along the Blue Ridge Parkway, but didn’t have much more than flurries here at 2,300 feet…until February 12, 2014.
Winter blahs getting you down? Looking forward to thawing out and getting outdoors this spring? It’s not too far away for us here in the mountains of western North Carolina! The Inn on Mill Creek B&B is located in McDowell County, North Carolina, about halfway between the towns of Old Fort and Black Mountain. Our county is known for its outdoor recreation, with awesome hiking trails and mountain biking trails, trout fishing streams and waterfalls, great places to walk and plenty of areas to explore nature.
