One of the stores at Avalon in Alpharetta is Orvis — that reminded me of seeing the Orvis Shooting School in Sylacauga at Pursell Farms. Leslie and I visited Pursell earlier this year and have been thinking about a girls’ weekend there — there’s a hotel (in fact, not just a hotel but also their Hamilton House and the Orvis Farmhouse), spa, restaurants, golfing (haaaaa), longhorns to look at:
Really, I think Leslie and I would be happy with the spa/dining (loooook at those menus)/Netflixing whilst wearing robes in bed/watching longhorns aspect. But I’m also intrigued with the Orvis offerings — there’s a sporting clay course, we can take fly fishing lessons, and a wing shooting lesson (I don’t even know what that means — maybe generalized bird shooting, like ducks/quail/etc?).
I’ve been skeet shooting with a bunch of girlfriends at Selwood Farm in Alpine, Alabama, and that was a *lot* of fun.
Anyway, that’s something we’ll be planning — but another thing we had planned in Sylacauga this trip was to take B to the Blue Bell Creamery, where we got to watch ice cream being made/packaged in their factory (no photos allowed) and had a cup of ice cream in their parlor
and we visited the Imerys-Gantt Obervation Site, which we’ve been to before. Lots of room for the kids to run around, find marble pieces to play with, and you can see and hear the quarry trucks mining the marble,too:
This thistle we saw there:
Shug and Shugie playing on a previous visit — if you have kids, there’s a huge open lot here to play and burn off some energy:
The “I’ll be Home for Christmas” package at Pursell sounds terrific.
Also: horseback riding at Pursell…yessss.
One of my other really great friends just got back from a trip to France, Spain, and Portugal where she took just the most fabulous pics of well, you know, castles, pastry shops, cathedrals, antique stores, and the Portuguese School of Equestrian Art and ohmygoshhhhhh there’s this video I found on YouTube: