2012 National Gingerbread Competition

Photo Credit: RomanticAsheville.com

Grove Park Inn in Asheville is hosting the 2012 National Gingerbread House Competition display from now through January 2, 2013. This is the 20th year that Grove Park Inn has held the competition and the entries seem to have gotten grander and grander over the years.

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North Carolina Mountain Birds: Wild Turkey

Wild Turkey checks out the orchard at the Inn on Mill Creek

We’ve picked the Wild Turkey as the November bird for our 12 Months of Birding series. We see Wild Turkeys at the Inn on Mill Creek quite frequently…they seem to be big fans of our apple orchard. As year-round residents, Wild Turkeys enjoy scattered open spaces in Pisgah National Forest (like our orchard) and feast on acorns, fruit, insects and fern fronds, all of which are in good supply here.

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Sunny November Day at Biltmore Estate

Standing on the South Terrace looking toward the Library Terrace

Early November in the mountains of Western North Carolina can be, in a word, temperamental. Different elevations can see different weather. For example, the higher elevations such as Mt. Mitchell (highest peak in the eastern United States) saw several inches of snow earlier this week! We had cool temps with some rain and even some snow flurries at our elevation the first part of the week, which was the earliest we remember it snowing since we arrived in 2007.

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2012 Foothills Arts & Crafts Holiday Show

It’s always a treat to see the work of our talented local artists up close, so we were really excited to hear that two of our local artists’ groups — the Arrowhead Artists and Artisans League (A3L) and the McDowell Arts Council Association (MACA) — will be hosting the first Foothills Arts & Crafts Holiday Show on Saturday and Sunday, November 17-18, 2012, at the Corpening Memorial YMCA in Marion (25 minutes east of the Inn on Mill Creek).

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