Meeting Up With One Of My Fly-Tribe Friends

Keep people in your life who truly love you, motivate you, encourage you, enhance you, and make you happy. If you know people who do none of these things, let them go.
                                                                                            ~Unknown

If you've been following me for any length of time, you're aware that I am part of a special group of phenomenal women who call ourselves, Fly-Tribe.  This is partly because we all met  from an online class taught by Kelly Rae Roberts and it was about getting our art business off to a flying start.  Since we began, I've been fortunate to actually meet a few in person.  This April I went to Lake Geneva, WI for our first art retreat and one of the women I met was Linda Kinnaman.  She currently lives in Illinois, but has roots in Michigan. You can check out her website right here and her blog.   She told me she would be coming to my area in the summer and maybe we could get together.  Well, we did so yesterday at the  Frederick Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, MI.  Along with Linda was her cousin Nancy who lives in Nebraska...

We had to get a photo shot of our feet.  Linda's is left, I'm in the center and her cousin Nancy is on the right...

Because we're in the middle of a heat wave, I suggested that we stroll around outside before it gets too hot.  The last time Mr. Cottage and I were at the Gardens, we discovered a new area we had never been to before that had a lake and lots of wetlands.  So this is where we started...

Because of all the heat, the algae was in full bloom, but the ducks didn't seem to mind...

Nor, the frogs.  He even croaked for us while we watched him and his buddy...

By mid-morning we were really melting, so we decided to take the tram around the other areas of the Gardens.  This place is huge and in the end, we knew we had made the right decision to go on the tram...

One of the stops was by The American Horse.  There are three that all pay homage to Leonardo Da Vinci.  They're really awesome...

The Meijer Gardens have a café, so Linda treated me to lunch. Chihuly glass hung everywhere on the ceiling at the café.  We parted afterwards, but I'm so glad we were able to connect in person for a second time.