Montevallo, AL

We visited another super sweet place with some hidden gems. 💎 This friendly college town is nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Montevallo has everything our family needed to make our visit so very memorable! 🌄

We have some wonderful family nearby that we visited, and we wanted to do some exploring while we were there. Our first stop was Orr Park and we ended up staying for hours. This beautiful park borders Shoal Creek and has 40 acres of land with walking trails, soccer fields, and a very nice playground. The grounds are well-kept and clean. 🏞

The most amazing feature however, are the trees. 🌳 There are magical tree carvings in a unique area of the park called Tinglewood. Tinglewood is named after the talented artist/wood-carver Tim Tingle. In the early 1990’s he saw the damaged cedar trees in the park and decided to bring about a new beauty to them. 🌳

While we were wandering around the park, I asked a gentleman about the trails as we had never been there before. I also asked him a bit about the carvings. I couldn’t believe it when he said the artist himself was at the park working on a new carving! 🪓We hightailed it over to where he was working and asked if we could talk to him for a few minutes. Mr. Tingle graciously granted us his time and we had a lovely chat and even were able to make a couple short videos of him while he worked. 🤩 You can find those videos here:

Interview with Tim Tingle Part 1

Interview with Tim Tingle Part 2

Mr. Tingle told us that he worked in the coal mines for over 30 years and then retired. He decided to keep himself busy by making his amazing carvings. He is currently on his 72nd carving in Tinglewood, with more on the way. 🤯

We asked him which of his carvings were his favorite and he pointed us to a truly incredible and detailed frog he had carved. 🐸 I wondered if he named any of his creations and while he doesn’t normally name them, one of them is fondly known as “Osama Bad Hair Day!” 🤣 He found this piece of wood floating in the nearby river and decided to cement it in the ground upside down and start his carving. It was really cool! 😎

I promptly named his current piece “George.” 🥰 When he starts carving each piece, he doesn’t know what they’re going to be until he gets started and the wood starts speaking to him. “George” is destined to be a little hillbilly gnome and will have adorable features and big toes. 😀

Mr. Tingle also has some of his carvings available for purchase at the Owen Gallery in Montevallo. We were fortunate that he had some miniature carvings with him that interestingly he makes out of golf balls. They are so detailed and adorable that we had to purchase one. They are all signed by Mr. Tingle and each is a tiny handmade masterpiece. 🎨

We were invited back by him to attend the Tinglewood Festival. This woodworking event features chainsaw carving, a whittling contest, and art demonstrations. Mr. Tingle also assured us there would be plenty of food, folks, & fun! 🥳

After chatting with Mr. Tingle, our family happily ran through the park trying to find each of the carvings and taking tons of pictures. The kiddos said it reminded them of Easter egg hunts. We had a delightful time and the kids called it one of the best days ever! 🥰

After all of the adventuring, we had a nice picnic at the park. We enjoy eating out at restaurants, but we definitely need to eat healthy as well. We really enjoy grinding our own flour from wheat berries then baking our homemade bread. 🍞 It’s super healthy and delicious! Before we left for Alabama, we made sure to bake a few loaves of bread to bring with us. I’d like to let you know that we found a great place to buy our grains and other organic/GMO-free foods. We recently started purchasing a lot of our food from Azure Standard. You can check them out if you’re interested by clicking on my link here. We highly recommend them for high quality organic products at a decent price. 😊

We hope you are enjoying our travels! We’d love to welcome you to subscribe to our email list, Facebook, & YouTube channel. You can also share it with your friends, if you’d like. We added some videos on our YouTube channel to go along with the post: https://www.youtube.com/@TravelingwiththeTrapps

Thanks so much and stay tuned for more Traveling with the Trapps! 😀

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