As if my surprise appearance weren’t enough, Dad arranged a surprise birthday lunch for my mother at the Wolf Mountain Vineyards. In addition to a tasting room in Dahlonega, GA they have beautiful winery in the North Georgia mountains. We ate far too much food at the buffet and soaked in the great views.

Not too much wine, though… those mountain roads are curvy!

After an afternoon nap it was back to the farm to visit with the bison again. They were a bit more frisky this time, thundering down the hill for food and charging at one another when someone was hogging the feed bowl.

In the last post about the bison I mentioned that I thought northeast Georgia was an odd place for bison. Doing a little reading while typing this up, however, proves otherwise. I had always assumed that bison were limited to the grassy plains of the West. Not so. It seems that the southeast was also part of their range, with Oglethorpe and others writing about them in the early 1700’s.

This article about Bartram’s Buffalo Lick, in fact, mentions the Broad River, which runs adjacent to the farm and is the namesake for Broad River Bison. Go figure!

The last few pictures are of an old house across the river on my great uncle’s land. I’ve already forgotten which distant relative had a hand in building it, but the missing chimney stones from this house have been in my grandfather’s great room as long as I can remember. I wanted to capture that on film before the house crumbled… and before the lovely sitting chair disappeared from the window.