The Winston-Salem Dash, our minor league baseball team, makes it’s home at the BB&T Ballpark. This new, modern stadium is only a couple of years old and has been a big hit with the citizens. It is also the starting/finishing point for many local 5K and 10K running events. Yesterday, Princess Gail participated in the Home Run Fun Run 5K. We had a beautiful, clear, crisp morning and it was great fun!

Our neighbors across the street have season tickets to the Wake Forest University football games. They couldn’t make it this week so they kindly gave us their tickets! Very nice! So, after Gail’s 5K we went home, cleaned her up (LOL), and went to our first Wake Forest football game.

The BB&T Field is small but absolutely gorgeous, as you might imagine since Wake Forest University’s funding sources include RJ Reynold’s tobacco money and BB&T. I’m grateful to them for reinvesting back into their (our) wonderful community.

After the game, we met our friends April and Brent in Pilot Mountain for a nice dinner. Gail and I had a really good day!

But we did see a few others that I don’t see every day. A group of Cedar Waxwings flew in to feast on berries. (It’s a bit overexposed, but it’s the only way to get at least some detail of small subjects against a bright sky.)

A pair of male Red-winged Blackbirds were just hanging out:

Here are two shots of a Yellow-rumped Warbler, just because I love all the warblers and their songs.

We also saw a Great Blue Heron flying by, a bunch of our state bird Cardinals, a Carolina Chickadee, Mallard Ducks and Blue-winged Teal, Downy Woodpeckers and a Red-bellied Woodpecker, a Mourning Dove, a Blue Jay, an Eastern Bluebird, American Goldfinches, and best of all, a Belted Kingfisher. It was an excellent three hour walk!

I’ll have to come back to catch a glimpse of that Barred Owl!

And a couple of shots of the Golden-crowned Kinglet:

This morning, we started out with a bike ride around Salem Lake, one of our favorite rides.

Later in the afternoon, we went with our friends April and Brent to check out the North Carolina Beer Fest at Tanglewood Park. There was an unbelievable number of people trying to get into the park. It took about an hour, but we finally parked amidst an ocean of cars. Then we found out it cost $30 to get in, for the privilege of sampling as many beers as we wanted. None of us thought that was worth it, so after all that, we left! No big deal, we had fun just being part of the craziness. We ended up having a nice dinner at our favorite Winston restaurant, the Village Tavern.

After that, we all went to catch our first Winston-Salem Dash baseball game, on another glorious evening of fine weather. It’s a great little stadium, brand new this year, and we beat the Myrtle Beach Pelicans! Yay us!

So far, a most excellent weekend! I think I’ll add to this post with whatever tomorrow brings!

Okay. So today is “tomorrow!” I started the day asleep! I didn’t set an alarm and slept in a bit. It was wonderful! Then I lounged around in my underwear. (Oops. Can I say that on a blog?! — Of course I can! It’s my blog dammit!) Then I ran on the treadmill, and later ran a few errands with Princess Gail. It was a great, mindless kind of day.

We spent the evening with a bunch of new friends. They were all absolutely wonderful! A very welcoming and fun crowd! We had a delicious dinner at a funky restaurant in downtown Winston, Sixth and Vine. The place has a fun schedule of activities, so I think it will become one of our favorite stops.

All in all, an excellent weekend!

Tanglewood Park is part of the Winston-Salem public park system. It has the usual parksy stuff, and boasts a very good golf course. It also has cool activities going on year round. Over the Christmas holiday, there is this cool Christmas lights display, a drive through in your car. There are about 180 really cool displays, many of them in motion, over a 4 mile course! We have discovered a great new holiday tradition here in Winston-Salem, and I’m sure it will become an annual event for us!

Here are a few facts:

Festival of Lights

Did You Know

• Tanglewood Park’s Festival of Lights began in 1992 with a generous grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Charitable Trust as well as funds raised by the Tanglewood Park Foundation.
• The first Festival of Lights in 1992 was a 1.5 mile route with only twenty five displays. Today the route has grown to just under 4 miles with one hundred eighty displays, of which seventy are animated.
• The Holiday Gift Village began in 1994 with only ten exhibitors under an enclosed tent. The Gift Village has since moved to the Red Barn and has grown to include 120 exhibitors.
• On average 250,000 visitors attend this yearly event.
• The largest attendance for the Festival of Lights was in 2001. As we celebrated our 10th Anniversary and honored those who sacrificed their lives on 9-11, an estimated 300,000 visitors converged on Tanglewood to lift their spirits and celebrate the holidays.
• The Driving Golfer display was one of the original displays of the Tanglewood Festival of Lights back in 1992 and remains today as one of the favorites of visitors. Each year Tanglewood adds or replaces exciting displays to the Festival.
• Each year Tanglewood Festival of Lights Outreach Program benefits over 12,000 disadvantaged adults and children from the community.
• Tanglewood begins setting up displays during the month of August to be ready for this large scale event which begins in mid November.
• There are now over approximately a million individual lights that complete Tanglewood’s Festival of Lights.
• Tanglewood’s Festival of Lights has been selected as a Top 20 Event in the Southeast and a Top 100 Event in North America.

It’s the 127th annual Dixie Classic Fair in Winston-Salem, North Carolina!  Let’s see, that means the first one was in 1882!!!  We had to go, because we’re Winston newbies and have to check out all these things for ourselves.  I’m not much of a fair-goer, but as far as these things go, it was the best one I have ever attended.  It was easy to find a parking space and it only cost $5.00 in a dude’s backyard across the street from the entrance. They had a bunch of animals, old tractors, and other farmy stuff.  They had a “Yesteryear Village” with demonstrations about how they used to do things back in the day.  There was a huge area for rides and games.  There were many, many junk food stands.  My favorite was the Giant Turkey Legs stand.  (I LOL’d but didn’t buy one.)  Though we did buy a funnel cake and lemonade.  I’m a sucker for funnel cakes!  There are antiques displays and competitions.  There are art competitions for all ages.  They also have live music, chain-saw artists, trick bike riders, rodeo, nightly fireworks, etc, etc, etc!  All in all, pretty cool!

Last week Princess Gail and I had a great breakfast at a cool place we discovered through our Yelp iPhone app.  It’s called the Midtown Café and dessertery, aptly named and conveniently located on Stratford Road close to business-40, which is central to everything in Winston-Salem. They only do breakfast and lunch, but they do it really well! I always start out with a hot chocolate, because I am uncontrollably addicted to it, so you can imagine my giddiness when this arrived:

I was already satisfied and ready to give them 5 stars when the actual breakfast arrived. I had the best banana pancakes I’ve ever had, sprinkled with macadamia nuts, while Gail had the awesome sweet potato pancakes.

We didn’t have room left for the desserts, but in a place like this, you can imagine! They are worthy of a specific trip and blog post when we really “need” a dessert.

Life is good!

: )