Of course we have this fantastic view, the solitude, the peace and quiet, but one of the main things that has convinced us to move up here full time, is the sense of community that we have up here. I guess it's because we are all fairly like minded individuals. Most of us have a sense of adventure, most of us either built our own cabins or did a lot of our own work, and most of us moved up here to get away from the maddening crowds of civilization.

We have lived in our neighborhood in Trussville for about 25 years, and we know all of our neighbors, but I can't ever remember having drinks and dinner with any of them, yet up here we all do that several times a week, we go on vacations together and we all help each other out on projects too. The last several weekends several of us have teamed up cutting and splitting firewood. We have a new single gal that is building a house and moving up here full time and lots of trees had to be cut down so she let us split a bunch and take them home and my buddy is building an addition and he had to cut some trees, so we all chipped in on that as well. We all got lots of firewood including quite a bit of pine for our outdoor fire pits.

Two of my buds Scott and Skip splitting firewood in my driveway:



Mrs. Irish stacking:

She always wears the most inappropriate footwear for any project. I had to talk her out of the flip flops with flowers on them to stack firewood. She changed into Keen sandals.



Helping Scott cut up a bunch of pine at his place and splitting it up for our outdoor fire places



I had to upgrade my outdoor fire pit wood storage area to handle all the pine:



I know you're thinking, "Why pine?" Well it's free. We have a lot of outdoor fires and it keeps us from burning the oak, hickory and maple so we can save it for heating the house.