Pining for the Fjords

Don't forget to read Part 1 ! Posing with the South Fork Holston River When last we blogged, we traveled to Kingsport, TN, for our very first dog show (as spectators) - the Bull Terrier Club of America's annual Silverwood celebration!  We'd checked into Flanagan Brothers Bierworks , our Harvest Host for the weekend and attended the dog show's costume contest and parade, which was just as entertaining as you might imagine. As I mentioned in Part 1 of this blog series, Kingsport is only about 20-30 minutes from Johnson City, where Uncle Bill, Aunt Mary Alice, and Kathryn live, and we were lucky enough to spend a good amount of time with them while we visited the area.  We met them on Friday night for dinner at Riverfront Seafood Company , a local spot with all sorts of great options.  Since we were early, we wandered the river trail for a little bit, taking pictures and trying to avoid getting hit by an errant bat (the kind with wings, not the baseball kind). This looks

  A sweet old girl we met at the Silverwood Costume Contest I'm sure those of you who regularly use Facebook have seen its algorithm at work; you do a quick search for a new pair of Crocs, and your feed is inundated with related content, from links to rubber clogs made by Temu to videos of alligators crawling over golf course fences to memes like this: A very important distinction My feed is a mix of all sorts of things, but it's mainly shopping links to snarky t-shirts and videos of Bull Terriers and Malinois dogs doing all sorts of ridiculous things.  It's not too surprising, then, that about six weeks ago, while I was performing my nightly scrolling, I ran across a post advertising the Bull Terrier Club of America's (BTCA's) annual dog show, called Silverwood .  Silverwood moves around each year, the better to allow folks from different parts of the country to attend, but this year, it was going to be in Kingsport, TN, just four hours south of us.  When I realize