Painted Pony Guesthouse

10/13/2026

Great write up on our local Coke Ovens Museum and Park.

10/09/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Dxgf6Utdq/?mibextid=wwXIfr

One of the choices nearby for going horseback riding.

09/25/2026

09/25/2026

09/25/2026

https://www.furnishedfinder.com/property/1043485_1

Trying something new. Listing on Furnished Finders. Still on Airbnb for now. Going to see how this works out in the next year.

Set on a peaceful 17-acre farm in rural Tennessee, this well-maintained, fully furnished 2-bedroom, 1-bath farmhouse offers approximately 900 square feet of comfortable living space with all utilities included. The original 1945 farmhouse combines country character with the practical features that m...

09/21/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1C3VXfqhN3/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Several choices in the area for train rides. I have always enjoyed trains and we are going on a tour soon.

In the North Georgia mountains, you can ride a “Fall Foliage” train aboard the Blue Ridge Scenic Railway, where autumn turns the hillsides along the Toccoa River into a mix of bright yellow, orange, red, and lingering green. Trips leave from the historic 1905 depot in downtown Blue Ridge and travel a 26-mile roundtrip route through the mountain countryside. The 2-hour Fall Foliage Express gives you the river and mountain views without a stop, while the 4-hour Extended ride includes a 2-hour layover in McCaysville, Georgia, and Copperhill, Tennessee. You can shop, eat, explore both little towns, and even cross the Georgia-Tennessee state line on foot before boarding for the return trip. Open-air and closed coaches are available, and the 4-hour ride also offers an adults-only Premier Car for riders 18 and older. Passenger excursions on this line were brought back in 1998 after regular passenger service had ended decades earlier. Fall rides are running now through November 3, with winter trips beginning November 5. Trains continue on many dates through November; Wednesdays are generally off the schedule, along with a few other dates.

09/07/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EX2TkcNiQ/

Interesting history. we have a round concrete silo on our farm.

The tall, round farm silo that shows up on postcards, in paintings, and in most people's mental picture of a farm has a surprisingly specific origin. It traces back to 1888 and a Wisconsin dairy farmer named John Steele, who had been using a square wooden silo for years and kept losing silage to spoilage in its corners, where the packed feed never sealed tightly enough against the walls.

Steele's fix came from an unlikely place: a wooden washtub sitting around his farm. If a round tub could hold water tight using nothing but curved wooden staves bound with metal hoops, he reasoned, the same principle should work at a much larger scale. He built a round silo, 18 feet across and 30 feet tall, out of wooden staves banded together exactly like a barrel, and it stood in daily use for 27 years.

The idea spread fast. Agricultural scientists refined it further within a few years, and by the 1890s, farmers across the Midwest were abandoning square, corner-wasting silos for Steele's round design. Vertical staves bound with iron bands became the accepted standard construction method, and while wood was the original material, the same basic stave-and-hoop structural principle carried forward into concrete, which is what most surviving tower silos, including ones still standing today, are actually built from.

It's a small, satisfying kind of engineering story: a genuinely persistent problem, corners that never sealed right, solved by simply asking what a laundry tub already knew how to do, then building it thirty feet tall.

08/14/2026

With Sequatchie Valley TN – I just made it onto their weekly engagement list by being one of their top engagers 🎉