A HIDDEN Gem? Small Town Arizona 🌵☀️ PINE, AZ 🌲

i am on the scenic state route 87 right here in arizona uh it's known as the b-line highway and i am on my way to pine the population is about 1700 and give or take it all depends on the website that you go to to get your information but i'm excited to get there i hope you are too and we'll be in pine in just a few minutes so let's get rolling [Music] all right so i am at the old country inn here in pine and i was actually going to have my lunch here today but uh unfortunately i didn't do my homework they're not open on mondays i'm filming this video on a monday so they're not open but they have amazing wood-fired pizzas here i think it's the best pizza in all of arizona now you could probably argue with me on that one and i would appreciate that that's fine if you do have a favorite pizza shop leave it in the comments below but this is their outdoor patio seating area they do have indoor seating as well and they expand it a little bit it's kind of cool it's a really cool place for families to come to they have outdoor seating here and they got games for the kids games for people to play and they have they just opened this not too long ago called the tap room at old country inn so it's a tiny little place and they got craft beers and wine and that type of stuff and some more seating up on the deck and i guess i should have done my homework but i didn't so anyway that's the old country end guys i highly recommend it if you're coming through pine and uh you want to stop for lunch again they have some of the best pizza in all of arizona all right guys i'm at a place in pine arizona right now called skies all right so check this out these are all like chainsaw carvings again it's called skies and pine llc and you can see they've got bears uh they got eagles check out that really cool uh tp in the background right there they have huge bears so this thing's probably eight nine feet tall hi there hi i'm a youtuber the small town tourist are you the owner no i'm not i'm the general manager oh you're the general manager i treat it like my own but okay uh are you okay being on uh youtube of course okay and your name okay star i'm john nice to meet you nice to meet you so tell me about skies well skye's been making this furniture for 54 years it's all arizona wood all made by hand and all made by veterans oh really sky got started his great-grandpa actually got him started as a hobby back in the day and he ended up paying all of his college education by making furniture he got a master's degree in engineering he was already an artist so that was absolutely perfect for making furniture that was he a veteran himself oh absolutely absolutely he did two tours um in the coast guard now are you a resident here in uh fine yes i am awesome how long have you lived here well i've lived here for seven years but i've been coming up here for four since i was four years old what is great about pine actually it's the community our community sticks together it's a pretty conservative little town we take care of each other last year when the backbone fire was burning we all got evacuated everybody helped everybody else that's fantastic and i know pine has a lot of festivals and things like that almost every weekend it seems like there's something going on absolutely and they are so fun well you certainly have beautiful things here in these guys and i'm impressed with some of the it's just amazing stuff well let me give you a little tour here yeah let's do it okay this is my favorite wood this wood here is mesquite burl and burl is the hero every tree on the planet has burl it holds all of the genetic code all the dna of the tree is in the burl oh wow yes so it's it's very important to say the least and it's so pretty so this is the mesquite burl here um it has all these beautiful lines in it has little squigglies like these little bird's eyes they're part of the burl and it just makes for beautiful beautiful wood now all the legs are done out of manzanita and we harvest that within five or ten miles of here now you see these marks here get a good shot of this this is from elk chewing on the manzanita and elk love manzanita which means little apple in spanish because it tastes like apple and it has these little berries on them that look like apples and they taste like apples they are so cold so the native americans used to gather up all the little apples all the little berries and smash them and smash them into a liquid and if you had a tummy ache you drink the juice and get rid of your tummy ache oh wow it's not like they can run to walmart and get some alka-seltzer you know and so we do a variety of things here on this property we do all the lamps the lazy susans the cutting boards all the our beautiful clocks which are all also out of um the mesquite burl yeah that's the first thing i saw when i walked in i know aren't they beautiful awesome every one of them is unique and different we have one carver that does the ironwood and it's so funny because ironwood is a real messy tree it's you know everything is compared to ironwood um it's the hardest wood um you know a scale of one to ten where ironwood is a 10 for strength and hardness and it's a messy tree and it has really big thorns on it um and when you sand it it smells like poop oh jeez it's stinky stinky and very toxic i won't even sell raw wood out there uh if we have pinewood people to have kids okay because sometimes it might get thrown in the fireplace or something like that and i don't want to mess with that so we also do a lot of um um juniper and this is beautiful juniper here uh it has gorgeous grain in it we get the juniper off of um mostly uh private land they call us and say i've got a big juniper i need to take it down you want it we go okay yeah yeah and so it just makes beautiful beautiful furniture my cutting boards are awesome and we make the chicutery boards too we make them out of eucalyptus and uh this is a mesquite and people go but they're too pretty to cut on well this is a cutery board so that's beautiful on both sides but on our cutting boards i tell people well you cut on one side you serve and display on the other side you got best of both worlds and you just you know wash them with soap and water and throw them back on the wall that's right and they're great gifts and they're they're so easy to use but wait there's more this is a really pretty one too i really like this now on the inlay we don't use real copper because copper takes 1982 degrees to melt oh which when you're dealing with wood would be kind of inconvenient because the wood would go poof so you take a piece like this you cleaned up with a wire brush you sand it and you spray it with a product called deft deft get it home depot okay it's in the instructions and you take these and you make them look like this oh wow i know isn't that cool see and this is called alligator juniper this is a really pretty piece because see the the bark looks like alligator oh yeah that is really wild isn't that something yeah now we also do a lot of bars bar stools incredible dining room sets boy look at that when you see a perfectly good tree and there's a big wart on the side okay one percent of the time that's a burl the rest of the time that you see that big wart it's fungus it's sap it can be scar tissue from or like a critter eating it or lightning hitting it or a branch fell off and it's scarred but that one percent of the time it's actual burl the odds of this mesquite tree having 10 real burls is astronomical once in a lifetime everything's made right here in the usa well this is fantastic thank you so much and we're open and we're open all year round i know a few people that could probably use that sign alright guys so that was skies and star is awesome and the skies is amazing but now i'm starting to get a little hungry it took about i don't know maybe about two hours to get here today so i'm gonna go try to find something to eat let's check it out so there's a lot of festivals that go on here in pine arizona and this is kind of the central area where if this was a weekend kind of in the fall or through the winter or spring this entire area would be filled full of vendors and it's cool because the vendors that come they're all from arizona and they're all privately owned little vendor shops and there's a lot of artists there's a lot of wood carvers there's i guess people like photographers that take pictures of the desert in different parts of arizona and they come here and it's great it's a very festive environment because they've got a lot of food vendors that come as well they uh you've got the kettle popcorn people that type of thing and in this little pavilion here this little pavilion here is really cool because they have all these tables and at the other end the far end near the playground they're going to set up bands and they'll be local bands that will play here it's just a really cool in fact it gives me a feeling kind of back east kind of more of a back east feeling than i get from an arizona feeling you can see this is in honor of walt and wylene smith great last name by the way but all of these places when there's a festival going on all of these places will be just filled with people and vendors and different crafts and everything it's just really really awesome it's one of the things that makes pine unique the small town of pine get off the interstate get off the freeway and go visit small towns because the people in small towns are just awesome they love each other they take care of each other and and that's the way it really should be now across the street from the park they finally redid they remodeled this building this building was unremodeled for a very long time i believe it used to be a bed and breakfast or something but now it's called fancy finds home decor and more so i say we go check it out well they are open so that's a good start all right so when you walk in when you first walk in uh you see right away that they got some very nice clothes and so that's pretty awesome i love to see clothes clothes that you don't you wouldn't normally see in a big box store or a big department store they do carry farm fresh or a farmhouse fresh items and uh that is i i guess reba mcintyre is the spokesperson for that and that's awesome and check this out this is pretty wild you can walk right in and they got free bibles so they got the king james version right there so that's pretty cool warm glow candle company so you've got check out these homemade candles and like i said it smells so good here they've got gourmet coffee coffee that you probably have never seen before and that's what again that's what's great about coming to small towns and just stop and buy the local vendors in the stores they have things that you can't get anywhere else i'll get out of your hair ladies thank you let's see if we can't find somewhere that we can grab a bite to eat yeah so this was right down from fancy finds this is pine creek cabins so if you're looking for a place to stay if you want to come up to pine and just visit this would be maybe a great place because it's right off of the beeline highway it's right where all the stores are and all the antique shops and the restaurants and that type of stuff and so it's pine creek cabins give them a call and maybe uh again if you're coming up this area and you want to spend the night or spend a couple days they might be able to hook you up all right so on the far end of town the farmers market is right here which is pretty cool and right now the farmer's market is closed today it seems like uh everything in this town seems to be closed on mondays not everything but a lot of things and i would have really liked to check that out but uh maybe the next time next time i'm in pine i'll be able to come to the farmer's market so there was a restaurant that was not too far from the old country inn it was just down the street and it looked like a breakfast place and it looked like they had a lot of cars out front and that's one of the things one of the ways that i judge a restaurant when i go to small towns is whether it's busy or not i mean that's common sense right but if it's not busy it's probably not good and this place that i'm talking about i can't remember the name of it off the top of my head when i was driving in but there was a lot of cars out front so that tells me that it's good so we're gonna go check that out and uh grab a bite to eat i know i keep saying it but i keep finding all these different places in this awesome little town of pine and uh it's just it's just so cool the weather up here is amazing i would say it's probably in the low to mid 80s right now where when i left mesa this morning it was probably i want to say it was probably in the mid 90s already and that was about 8 o'clock this morning come on over here all right so i'm at the honey stand in pine and uh i was lucky enough even though the honey stand isn't open today it's monday i was lucky enough to meet mike here and mike you're the grandson of the owner right yes so tell me a little bit about the honey stand the kind of the history and everything and what you sell and all that type of stuff well the original building was built in 1929 by frank fuller and was opened as the pine post office oh wow at that time 87 the street right here was not here the street would come and turn right next to this building so the original building was facing that direction oh wow and then in about the 40s when this part of the road was re-opened the building was picked up and turned and then built into a texaco gas station by frank sun ralph so were you able to get from pine to to payson yeah how did you get there or was it like a dirt we still could the road would go out and around this property lines and cross the creek on the back side okay and then they came in you said in the 40s and they they ran yeah in the 1940s they came in the the government bought this strip of land because this piece of property and the piece of property over there is still owned by the fullers okay and the uh the building was turned into the texaco gas station and that was ran as a gas station by ralph fuller from 1945 until about the 1980s when when it was closed down because of health issues and it sat empty for about 10 years and then ralph's son robert opened up the honey stand oh okay we sell honey's jams jellies butters all sorts of now is robert your dad robert is my grandfather he's your grandfather okay very cool okay and he's been here since the 80s with the honey stand it first opened in about 89 okay well that's when i graduated high school here we go a long time ago yeah would you mind if we go inside and check out can you show me a little bit about yourself show me around a little bit all right oh check it out now is everything here like homemade or um everything over here is all of our all natural raw honeys we get these from two different distributors here in arizona so they're all locally locally sourced in arizona wow then we have whipped honeys which come from colorado and it's made by a company called honeyville then we have all of our butters salsas preservatives jellies these are all made by mountain farms they package them specifically for us okay same thing over here we have salad dressings olives over here we have some assortment garlic some asparagus and then more salsas jellies i'm a huge olive fan so just seeing like your spicy blue cheese and jalapeno olives that's enough to bring me back i'm excited about that and then we also for the kids we have honey sticks which are just little straws basically filled with flavored honey oh wow you bite off the end and you can suck on it those are a quarter of a piece okay okay and then up here we have a little wall with all the the history of the building like i was saying it was originally the post office up there is a picture of when it was open as a uh texaco oh check that out we have a the 25 year anniversary of the texaco station presented to ralph fuller okay get a better picture of that up here check that out wow that's really cool and then over here this is actually a picture of my grandparents when they open the honey stand okay look at that [Music] wow that is so cool man and you get big jugs of honey yeah we sell it by the gallon half gallon as well for people that are really into honey i guess there are some people right yeah well it never expires so you can keep it for as long as you want okay wow that is really cool and then you got some assorted candies yeah just some little knickknacks and chewies for you okay well i don't want to keep you from your work but dude thank you so much i was so disappointed when i came by and saw that it was empty or not empty but closed yeah i was like okay well you know it is what it is it's uh it's a monday i should have known better but for you to open it up and let me check it out it's just really awesome you're working i really appreciate it it's good and awesome yeah all right cool thanks brother thank you all right guys this is the early bird cafe and this is the restaurant that i drove by earlier after i found out that the old county uh pizza shop wasn't open so i drove by this and it was packed now that was around breakfast time so it's pretty late now it's a little bit uh afternoon so it's definitely lunch time but i'm going to check it out it's open it looks really really good and like i said when there's a ton of cars out in front of a restaurant you know it's good so i'm going to go in and i'm going to grab a bite to eat and we'll see it's in a few minutes all right well this place is called the early bird cafe and apparently the early bird does get the worm and the late bird doesn't because i missed it they closed at 11 30 today so they did recommend uh the pinewood tavern which is just up the street i think that's what the name of it is so i'm gonna go check that place out they said they've got great burgers and they are open today so we'll go check that out and maybe we can grab ourselves a good burger all right guys i am outside the pinewood tavern and uh it does appear to be open so that's a good start uh unlike everything else i've come across but there it is that's the outside and the good news is there's a lot of cars out front and that means it's going to be pretty good so i did notice this sign when i was pulling in looks like they got live music on saturday nights six to nine so no live music tonight but that's okay all right i'm gonna go grab a bite let's go in all right guys well uh it is open and they do seem to have a pretty cool menu so i guess their specialty is burgers here i don't know but the wait staff has been super friendly so far and i like that and it is a very packed it's kind of a cool place they have dollar bills on the walls like they do in tortilla flat awesome thank you so the wall to my right has the dollar bills all over it and they got a buffalo head in front of me on the wall which the buffalo is just my favorite animal just beside them they've got all kinds of elk antlers and theater antlers on the walls here uh it's pretty slick actually let me see if i can move around that's the dining room i'm kind of in the back back of the restaurant to the side but yeah very cool very cool place and i'm looking forward to having food here we'll see what it's like the lady at the other restaurant that i was going to eat at the early bird recommended the cowboy burger here and so i just might do that so they had a very interesting sign in the bathroom and if i remember before i leave i'll try to get a picture of it so my waiter anthony just told me that this place is owned by the same owner as the old country tavern which is cool that's that pizza place that i was going to stop at the old country in i'm sorry the old country inn and so i imagine if it's owned by the same people that the food here is going to be fantastic and that explains why it's busy so unfortunately i couldn't go to the old country again because it was closed today but this place is open and that makes me just as excited okay guys so this salad looks absolutely amazing and it's good that when you come into these small towns and you can find a great restaurant like that it's so important you know these little family-owned and operated restaurants are just so much better than the chains that you get down in the valley down in mason phoenix and gilbert and all that type of places you find a hometown home-cooked meal in these small little towns man i'll tell you what what a difference total difference maker so i'm gonna eat and uh and then we're gonna get back on the road [Music] so all in all pine is a great little town i met a lot of really nice people and it's a really slow monday but everybody was in a great mood they were very welcoming mike over at the honey hut was a super nice guy he even opened the business even though it's closed today he opened it today so that i could take a look at some of the things that they have to offer i really wish they would have been open because there's some things in there that i certainly would have purchased anthony b over at the cafe that i ate at the pinewood tavern what a super nice guy i mean he even gave me 20 off of my bill just for advertising or or showing his place today so that was really cool uh and then meeting star at the restaurant meeting star at skies where they sell all the wood products and all that type of stuff just awesome so overall this was a fantastic experience for me today the weather was perfect the people were amazing the stores that i went into were awesome and it's just that hometown feel it's that place where people take care of each other neighbors take care of each other and uh that's the way that it should be that really is i was thoroughly impressed with pine uh it is about i would say 15 miles north of payson just south of strawberry we're just at the bottom of the mogean rim and it is absolutely gorgeous today i would say probably in the mid 80s now it's probably 2 o'clock in the afternoon so that was my experience i hope you guys enjoyed it until next time get off the interstates and go enjoy small town america take care [Music] bye

Channel: Small Town Tourist

Views: 10,280

Keywords: pine, arizona, mormons, travel, tourism, pizza, tavern, wood, shopping, small town

Id: BJLtn-pWVnk

Length: 25min 23sec (1523 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 01 2022