A little summer happiness on the mountain: wood-fired pizza and a handpicked bouquet

It’s been a long time since I gave my city some love here.

Those who’ve followed alpha // whiskey // foxtrot since its inception know that I first began this blog in an attempt to love my mountain town better.  And I do love it here — most of the time — but every once in awhile, a sense of dissatisfaction overtakes me that makes it hard to be grateful for my surroundings.

So.

Yesterday, T and I decided to do a little exploring.  We wanted to get off our usual beaten path to the same six restaurants, and we also wanted to just be us for a bit…

(You have to admit, we’re kinda cute together, even if I *am* the human version of a Welsh Corgi — clearly too short for this handsome guy).

We drove out of the city and up into the hills — steered the Volvo through tight switchbacks until the mountains opened up to sky.  Eventually, the road leveled off in a high plateau full of cornfields shivering in a cool breeze, sun winking off the tin roofs of sleepy white farmhouses.

We turned a corner and found our destination:  Bent Mountain Bistro, a little oasis of good food in the exact middle of nowhere.  And I have to say:  if you’re one of my small band of local readers, I really, really hope you’ll make the trek up the mountain to try this place.

It’s an unassuming little roadside cafe with serious farm-to-table flare … without the usual farm-to-table elitism.  You don’t have to show up wearing Birkenstocks here.  You can teeter in wearing towering heels, like me, or you can scuff through the door wearing flip-flops made in China.  Nobody cares.

Meanwhile, you can look out the big plate-glass windows and see this:

You can order a pizza from the wood-fired-oven menu, or make like me and slurp down a big bowl of homemade chanterelle soup.  Beware, though … You might end up looking something like this:

(Actually, T wears a face like this for almost any pizza, but this particular pizza — mounded high with bacon and homemade barbecue — was just a little more joy-inducing than usual.)

When we were finished with dinner, we wandered outside into the warm summer light and ambled up an unlined road through the fields:

I picked an armful of Queen Ann’s Lace and clover from the ditch at the roadside — they might be weeds, but they’re some of the prettiest weeds I know — and when I had an embarrassingly large bouquet, we stuffed it and ourselves into the Volvo and drove back down into the valley.

This morning, I woke up and I saw this:

And that sense of gratitude I’d been looking for was right where I’d left it all along. ❤