The Haines Family: Fall Fun

Now that it's December, I realized I had better post these pics from our fall adventures!
Mid-October, we took a day trip to the "mountains of NC" and drove a little over 2 hrs to Asheville, NC. I think it was before their "peak" color weekend, but there were definitely more colorful leaves than we had here in the southern part of North Carolina.
Our first stop was the North Carolina Arboretum. Adam had found this online as a very inexpensive location to check out. We were impressed. We paid $8 to park and that was it, no admission fee, no fee to use the binoculars or nature trail back pack. In fact the whole nature trail back pack was quite a blessing b/c I had forgotten to bring a bag for the kids to collect leaves in. This nature trail back pack included binoculars, magnifying glass, bug box, and much more. All we had to do was go to the information desk and ask! And then you had to leave your driver's license w/ them in order to ensure that they would get the pack back when we were done.

In addition to all the nice flowers, plants and trees in the arboretum itself, we were right on the edge of the Blue Ridge Parkway, so we could see some great view of the mountains w/ the colorful leaves in the distance/background.
We spent about an hour walking thru the NC Arboretum, but then the boys were getting hungry. I had packed a lunch, and we had driven by a nice picnic area right before turning into the NC Arboretum. We drove about 3 min. "back" to that spot and had a great lunch right by a river.

Then we drove to The Grove Park Inn. It is a historic resort hotel on the western-facing slope of Sunset Mountain within the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Asheville, North Carolina. We were able to walk all around the resort inside and outside. Very beautiful, original stone-work throughout the building, huge and I mean HUGE fireplaces, and lots of smaller buildings around the property w/ antiques. There were even one whole building of full-size antique cars. The curator of the antique cars let the boys try out his "squirrel rod" (as opposed to a fishing rod). See the pics of Wyatt below! The bait was a peanut! We tried to get a nice family picture, but the boys weren't cooperating!

Then in mid-November, we we went to Aw Shucks which is a local farm that has an old general store, corn maze, hay ride, animal barn and many other outdoor fall activities. Here Wyatt is trying out the slide on a burlap bag.