It's Chicken Tour Day!

Hooray, it's a chicken tour day! We've been waiting and waiting and finally the busiest weekend of the year is here and everything is happening - the Got to Be NC Festival, the Artsplosure, Astronomy Days, and lots and lots of other events. Oh, and of course, the Henside the Beltline Tour de Coop.

So off we went early in the morning to get the map of the tour and mark the coops we (ok, I) wanted to see. And then a good friend, Maria, and her daughter stopped by and we all went on this tour.

The part I love about the tour isn't so much the chickens themselves, although they are beautiful, but the yards we get to see and all the awesome and interesting and just plain wacky things in these yards. So when I read descriptions of each coop, I pay particular attention to the ones marked with the "backyard of interest" icon.

It is also great fun going to the same yard year after year. You get to know the owners a bit better so that you're no longer just strangers poking noses into the nooks and crannies of their yards. Plus, honestly, it's interesting to see what changes have been made in the yard since the year before.

So this year we once again went to see our neighbor's coop. It's a wonderful yard, very kid friendly, with a big play structure and, new this year, a zip line. Plus their chickens roam free around the yard and can be petted and fed.

Then we went to another one of the must-visit-every-year yards, this one belonging to an NCSU professor. I love this yard the most because it reminds me so much of a nice dacha - a large veggie garden, lots of fruit trees and just enough chaos to look both relaxed and beautiful.

But gotta mix the old and the new, right? So we went to some new (to us) yards in the Mordechai neighborhood (ah, it's such a lovely neighborhood too, wish we could afford it).

So what did we see aside from lots of beautiful chickens and some cute 6-week old chicks? Ok, we discovered this amazing old house hidding in the woods. Aparently, it's one of the oldest surviving houses in the county and it's still being lived in. M spent quite some time looking at the beautiful chickens and a rooster in the wooded yard by this house, then scored a free chocolate cookie and played ball with the boys he met.

In one of the yards, the one with a beautiful designer coop, we found these giant tadpoles in the pond. So awesome and makes me want to go out into our yard and start digging so we too would have a pond with tadpoles and frogs.

Nearby was a house with another stylish coop. But more importantly, they also had a restored Airstream trailer that was open for a look-see (it's now a studio) and a tire swing.

We did have to cut our tour short because we were late for M's yoga. I would've skipped it altogether, but he loves it and was very upset at me suggesting such a thing. And then we went to our friends for an impromptu party with burgers and mojitos. There were 6 kids at the party, all boys. So you can image how fun it was for M. He was running around outside in his Boba Fett costume (he's been wearing it for the last few days) and pretending to freeze the "baddies" in carbonite. And I got to catch up with my friends!