Vacation....Tennessee style!

Finally!  After nearly 2 years...we made it back to our favorite stomping grounds....Chattanooga, TN.  This trip was specifically engineered around attending the 2016, 4 Bridges Art Festival...as a personal favorite of mine...not to mention was my birthday week.

We usually take our two toy fox terriers (which is always a hoot) to romp around in the woods with us (they make great tick magnets).  Chris and Pieces are sporting a smile in the photo below.  This time we purposely chose places to hike that would be least likely to have ticks crawling around. (That worked out real well...only one tick this trip.)

We also visited some of our other mutual-favorite places in the "nooga" such as McKay's Used Books, The North Chatt Cat (which is now the Pub), various shops and galleries on Frazier Ave and a few new one's on Main Street.

Thrilled to have AMAZING weather...we stomped around North Chickamauga creek which is an amazing outdoor extravaganza of mountain stream meets mountain trails.  Dodi...pictured here with me above...especially loves swimming but he didn't seem too crazy with the numbing cold temps of the fresh mountain water here. 

Seems like we were both especially drawn to water this trip. Most of what we spent our time doing involved the Tennessee River one way or another.  Here's the TN river above in front of the TVA Raccoon Mountain complex. Both dogs did play around in the water here some...and we just soaked in the beauty of the place...one moment at a time.

No vacation experience is complete without some wings and beer so naturally we visited Buffalo Wild Wings in Downtown Chattanooga.  We enjoyed sitting on the patio while watching the Grackles and Sparrows sweep in and grab the bits of fries on the ground.  Probably could have fed them by hand if we wanted to.

And then there was the actual birth date!  Here I am above enjoying a birthday morning campfire...in the still of the morning.  Doesn't get much better than that!

Stay tuned...always more adventures to come!

Spring turkey aerobics..

Well, it's that time of year again...where any available wild turkey tom comes to visit.  Who then visits over a period of days...and challenges our tom through the fence in an effort to court our female turkey.  It's quite entertaining to watch.

This year's wild tom visitor we have already named "TJ" for "Tom Junior" as he's been hanging around for about a week now.  My GOODNESS look how BIG he is!  (TJ is the one on the right in the photo above and our Tom is on the left.) Sugar Pea (our female) doesn't seem to be all that interested in TJ.  Time will tell I suppose.

Guess we shall see what happens.  In the mean time, we don't dare open the fence for the males to get a chance to fight one another. We're betting that our tom would likely be injured at best and possibly even fatally at worst.  So they can just do the turkey tom aerobics through the fence...until one of them decides enough is enough.

So goes the adventures of random wildlife showing up in our backyard.

Stay tuned for more adventures!


*******UPDATE*******
Well, Sugar pea disappeared with I assume to be the wild male tom for about a week. She has since returned and we no longer get visits from the male tom. So...time did tell.  We are glad sugar pea returned. We like her here.