The Mead's dinky castle! Here is the corn planter located on the side of the road as a marker for where to turn to reach Carla & Mark's neighborhood. How quaint!
You drive down the dirt road with breathtaking views of pine trees and mountains ahead and wildflowers bloom on either side.
Mark and Carla are wonderful jewelry artists. They chose to leave the phoenix area and move north to Alpine, Arizona about 2 years ago and they live in a beautiful cabin style home they built (aka the dinky castle). Please visit their website www.blackmountainjewelry.com to admire and purchase some amazing hand crafted fine jewelry.
Here's me & Carla in front of her home.
Bert & Mark in position on the couch. Picture taken from the bedroom loft.
Carla cooking some yummy dinner. She made dinner for us all weekend and it was superb! She is an amazing cook and everything was delicious plus, we had leftovers to take back to our cabin each night. What a hostess!
Well, I can't post about the lovely dinky castle without paying homage to all the wonderful woodland friends in the backyard. Carla is well stocked on peanuts for the blue jays and squirrels and sugar water for the hummingbirds (and boy there were a lot of humming birds) See Carla feeding the blue jays above!
Here are some stellar blue jays. See the baby up top chirping to her mama!
Here's me feeding a peanut to the abert's squirrel begging below the back porch.
The hummingbirds were the toughest to photograph. It is amazing how quick they are and how many there were! No joke at dusk there were sometimes 20+ hummingbirds feeding on the back porch. They aren't shy and fly right up to and all around you. I picked up some mini hummingbird feeders today via www.freecycle.org a recycling network. The Freecycle Network™ is made up of members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Pretty sweet.
Just before we left, Bert, Carla & I enjoyed a road trip satisfying lunch at the Bear wallow Cafe. Thank you to Carla & Mark for a lovely weekend. We loved the R&R and are looking forward to returning with the kids! Love you.
