The Biltmore

We woke up a little earlier on Thursday and were out of the hotel and sitting down for breakfast a little before 10:30.  We were staying in Asheville again so that meant we would not need to drive much today.  The one thing we wanted to do while in Asheville was visit the Biltmore Estate.

We went for breakfast to Tomato Jam, which had been recommended by our Roadfood book.  What caught our eye were the homemade biscuits that were supposedly the size of cats’ heads!  The breakfast did not disappoint.  Chris had an egg sandwich on one of those huge biscuits.  Jackie had a BLT with egg, plus an order of grits.

After breakfast we headed straight for the Biltmore Estate.  We were not sure what to expect with the Biltmore House and Estate.  The house is a mansion and is the largest private home in the US, at 135,000 square feet.  To give you an idea of what 135,000 square feet looks like, the White House is 55,000 square feet.  The house sits on an 8,000 acre estate that includes among other things, huge gardens, a winery, stables, and a 200+ room inn.  We had read about this place before but decided to come here as it is featured in one of our travel books, 1000 Places to See Before You Die.  The family still owns the estate but they no longer live there.  It is now a tourist attraction.  To say we were truly amazed would be an understatement.

The property was bought and the house built in the late 1890’s by George Washington Vanderbilt II, of the New York Vanderbilt family, as a summer home.  The estate originally covered 125,000 acres and it is said that in the early 1900’s it took a week on horse to cover the entire property.  A trip to the estate includes a tour of the house.  Private tours are available which give you in depth, behind the scenes looks at different parts of the house, but being that this was our first time here, we chose the standard tour which you take at your own pace.  We did purchase an MP3 player that gives you additional details that the standard pamphlet would not give you as you tour from room to room.  Included in the 250 rooms is an indoor swimming pool, an indoor bowling alley, several game rooms, tons of bedrooms, huge dining areas, kitchens, rooms filled with artworks, and 19^th-century novelties such as elevators, forced air heating,  fire alarms and an intercom system.  The house was also filled with numerous secret doors and passageways, which inspired Chris to possibly build false doors in our house when we get home.   The house was often used for entertaining and Jackie commented that she could see herself living during that period.  On the tour they commented that the people living at that time sometimes changed their clothes up to 8 times per day, depending on what kind of events the day held.  We probably spent close to 3 hours touring the inside of the house, and that was only the common areas on the main tour.  We were lucky to be here during the Festival of Flowers, which takes place in the spring when the flowers are in full bloom.  After touring the inside of the house we toured the gardens probably for another hour or two.  The landscape was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who also designed NY’s Central Park.  There were a maze of paths through the garden and greenhouse areas, and we really took our time to explore the whole place.    

Unfortunately, photographs were not allowed inside of the house but we did take some pictures of the outside and of the gardens.

After touring the gardens, we went on to the winery, where tastings and a tour were included in our tour ticket.  We chose not to go on a tour of the winery; we just went for the tastings.  For free, you were able to taste as many of their 22 different wines as you cared to try.  Again, we bought more than 2 bottles of wine.  Mom would be proud.

After leaving the estate pretty late in the day we headed back to the hotel with no real other plans for the day.  However, as we got closer to the hotel Jackie spotted a church which we had read about and wanted to tour.  Since some churches are open all the time, we decided to stop in.  This was more than a church.  This is the Basilica of St. Lawrence, located in downtown Asheville.  A Basilica is special designation given by the Pope to certain churches because of their historical importance, antiquity, dignity, or significance as a place of worship.  There are only 56 Basilicas in the US.   What most impressed us with this place was how it was built.  No wood or steel was used in construction of the building, only tiles and other masonry.  The roof is tile with a copper covering and is dome shaped.  The dome was built using thin layers of tile embedded in layers of mortar to create curved horizontal surfaces.  This way of building creates a strong, fireproof, and attractive surface, and surprisingly supports the weight of the roof.  The actual dome, again unsupported by any beams, measures 82 feet by 58 feet, and is considered the largest free standing elliptical dome in North America.  The pictures taken from the inside do not really show the size and grandness of the dome.

After leaving the church we headed around the corner to a Cuban restaurant, Havana Comida Latina.  We were going to eat in but we had beer in the cooler and our beer that we paid $15 for an 18-pack back home is much cheaper than the $15 we would have paid for two beers in the restaurant.  So we got take-out.  We read about this restaurant on foursquare (thanks Uncle Timmy), which is essentially an app for the phone that lets you kind of sign in to places and gain points as you sign in.  The points don’t get you anything, just bragging rights.  A cool feature of foursquare is you can leave tips for others.  This restaurant had a lot of tips from past diners, plus we like Cuban food so we decided to go there.  We each got a Cuban sandwich with sides of fried yucca, rice and beans, fried platanos, and empanadas.  We also found yet another geocache while we were waiting for the food.  This one was located right in the middle of downtown for anyone to see.  The thing about it that made it unsuspecting to the average person is that it was disguised as a birdhouse.  You simply lift the lid off of the birdhouse and inside is the geocache.  Normally a birdhouse on the sidewalk in the middle of downtown would seem strange in itself, but this was right outside a birding supply store, so it wasn’t so strange after all.  This is a popular way to hide caches.  We think Uncle Tony will like this type of hide.  We took our food back to the hotel and called it a night.

The Smokies

On Tuesday we slept in a little bit once again, even though we were outside in a tent.  This is the good thing about vacation; you don’t have a care in the world.  There were no ducks to greet us when we got up, at least not at first.  We were also happy to see that no animals had found our campsite overnight, at least none that we could hear.  Sometimes when we camp you can hear animals scurrying around in the bushes at night.  They sound so big but being that it is so quiet they are probably no bigger than mice or chipmunks walking in the leaves.  The quiet of the night makes them sound much bigger than they are.  Last night we had nothing, just that stupid bird that wouldn’t shut up.

We ate leftover bagels and cream cheese for breakfast, took a shower in the extremely clean shower that we had mentioned yesterday, packed up, and were on our way.

The first stop was for a geocache on the way to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  We had been driving for only about an hour, first through hilly terrain, and now through a narrow valley which had a river running through it.  The river was small and somewhat fast moving and as a result, there were numerous rafting companies up and down both sides of the road for miles around.  When we stopped along side of the river for the cache, a woman was walking up from the river wearing a lifejacket and carrying paddles.  The only problem was she had no boat.  Apparently she fell off of her raft and the raft kept going downstream.  She was left to either walk back to the rafting company (only about a quarter mile up the road) or wait for someone to come get her.  We wondered how often that happens, we suspect pretty much every day.  After taking some pictures of the river and the rafters we continued driving.

We hit the visitor’s center for Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Cherokee, NC a little less than an hour later.  We stopped in to get some maps and some information on the park and to get our National Park passport stamps.  At each National Park you can get a stamp from that park with the date on it and you can “collect” these stamps.  Years ago Jackie said that we should collect these stamps but for whatever reason we never did.  Only now that we’ve been to dozens of National Parks, we have decided to start collecting these stamps.  We also learned how these mountains got their name.  The name "Smoky" comes from a natural haze that often hangs over the mountains and looks like smoke.  The haze is a result of warm air from the Gulf of Mexico quickly cooling in the higher elevations of the mountains.  The Great Smoky Mountains are fairly high in elevation as well, with several peaks over 6000 feet in height.  The highest point east of the Mississippi River is in the Smokies.  There is also a fairly large black bear population in the mountains.

While at the visitor’s center we inquired about Blue Ridge Parkway maps and guides.  They ranger told us that there is a Blue Ridge Parkway visitor’s center in Asheville, NC, about 90 miles away via the parkway, or a little shorter via faster roads.  The Blue Ridge Parkway was the main reason for us choosing this particular route north from Alabama.  The southern end of the 460 mile parkway is in Cherokee, NC, so we would be on the parkway for much of the next several days.  The ranger told us that Asheville, despite being only 90 miles on the parkway, would take about 3 hours.  This is not a parkway as you would find in metropolitan areas, but instead it is a two lane road (one lane in each direction) with rarely more than a half mile of straightaway.  The speed limit is 45 and there are lots of things to stop and see along the way.  We had planned on getting to Asheville for the night but we also wanted to get over the mountains and into Gatlinburg, TN to stop at a Hard Rock Café.  Gatlinburg was only 30 miles or so over the mountain, but those 60 miles out and back would likely take us 2 hours or more, as Gatlinburg is touristy place and the road was very slow moving over the mountain. Plus we wanted to take a side trip to the top of Clingmans Dome, which is the highest point in Tennessee, but another 7 miles (one way) off of our route plus a half mile walk to the top from the parking lot.  Given this fact, we started asking about campgrounds along the way, but since we had just camped last night we didn’t really want to camp a second night in a row.  So by this point, we weren’t sure what we were going to do for the rest of the day and we figured we would decide as the day went on.  By now we were getting hungry.  There wasn’t much choice for food back in town except for fast food, which we were not in the mood for.  Since we knew we were likely not camping that night, we decided to stop at a picnic area and cook our remaining burgers before they went bad.  We stopped at one of the park’s picnic areas, set up the grill and had a late lunch of cheeseburgers.  While we were eating, Chris kind of planned the rest of the day.  We decided not to go all the way over the mountain to Gatlinburg, as it would take too much time and the real reason we were going was just for a Hard Rock magnet.  Instead we would go to the top of the pass, head up to Clingmans Dome, then back down to the parkway, drive park of the way to Asheville on the parkway and stay in Asheville for two nights using points that we had accumulated at one of the hotel chains over the past year.

So we drove to the top of Newfound Gap on the NC/TN border, and then headed up the side road to Clingmans Dome.  The road goes almost to the top of the mountain.  Almost is the key word here.  It gets you to within a half mile of the top, and then it is all uphill from there.  We figured a half mile, no problem, right?  Not.  The climb probably isn’t so bad but in the middle of the afternoon, when it is still 80 degrees out and the sun is shining, it is a little tougher.  We had to stop several times to catch our breath but we found it comforting to see that young kids were also sweating and stopping frequently, as were people who were in much better shape than us.  Maybe the slightly thinner air contributed as well.  The paved trail climbs 330 feet from the parking lot to a tower on top.  The summit of the mountain is 6643 feet, it is the highest point in Tennessee, and it is the third highest point east of the Mississippi.  The TN/NC border actually straddles the top of the mountain.  Up on top there is a futuristic looking tower that you can climb and look in every direction.  The concrete tower is actually kind of ugly and looks like something out of the Jetsons.  

Prior to starting our trek up we saw a sign warning us of bear activity in the area.  We figured at some point on our trip we would see bears, we just didn’t think it would be right away.  About a quarter of the way up we saw people stopped on the side of the trail taking pictures.  There was a ranger there too pushing the people back.  The ranger was taking an air gun out of his backpack as we approached.  There were two cubs just off to the side of the trail, they were really small, we figured they were born over the winter.  (turns out bears give birth usually in February while they are hibernating)   We got a picture of one of the cubs before the ranger opened fire with his air gun.  The gun he used doesn’t really hurt the bears, it instead is intended on making the bears afraid of people.  It looks and shoots like a small uzi but it shoots quick shots of air at the bears and it is kind of loud.  Bears, especially cubs, while very cute, are still quite dangerous.  Bear attacks on people, especially black bear attacks, are very rare, but if they feel threatened, the bears can still attack, and they can easily kill a person.  With so many people in the park, human/bear encounters are more frequent, but they rarely results in bad encounters.  But it can still happen and the rangers do their best to make sure that the bears are afraid of people rather than comfortable around people.  After chasing the bears back into the woods (one of the bears actually climbed a tree…they are excellent climbers) the ranger said that the mother bear was just out of sight down the hill.  Having cubs around makes the mother bear a little more dangerous as she is quite protective of her babies, but even then, attacks on people are rare.  In fact, according to Wikipedia, only 23 people died from black bear attacks from 1900-1980.  Nevertheless, the park does whatever it can to make bears afraid of people.

After spending some time on top of the mountain and looking for bears on the walk back down we drove back down to Cherokee.  While the road was extremely steep, Chris wanted to see if he could make it all the way down in low gear without stepping on the brakes.  We almost did it but we did have to step on the brakes a few times, as even in the lowest gear the beast was starting to get away from us on the steeper hills.  We now see the real use of those runaway truck ramps you sometimes see on the highways. 

Once back down at the bottom of the mountain we stopped at a working grist mill.  A grist mill’s basic function is to turn grain into flour.  Today most grist mills use either electricity or some kind of fossil fuel to crush the grain, but the historic type, or the kind we saw, uses water to turn gears which in turn drive a mill stone (large round stone) which rests on another stone.  Grain is poured between the two stones and crushed into flour.  To give you an idea of how long grist mills have been around, in England the number of grist mills in use peaked at around 17,000 in the year 1300!  We were lucky enough, or so we thought, to see a functioning one, which as it turns out is only 1 of about 50 functioning grist mills in the country.  Turns out the grist mill is in operation daily from 9 AM to 5 PM.  We arrived at 5:08.  We were still able to take some nice pictures of the mill.  We were able to see where water was diverted from a stream and into the mill, which was pretty cool in itself.

After leaving the grist mill we headed into town where we had better cell reception so we could make a reservation for the night in Asheville, NC.  We chose Asheville because we wanted to visit the Biltmore Estate, which is located in Asheville.  We figured we would drive 30 or so miles on the Blue Ridge Parkway and then head into Asheville via a faster road part way through the trip.  Those 30 miles probably took us a little over an hour.  We stopped frequently at many view points and pull offs. 

When we finally got to the point where we could head into Asheville via the quick route our choice was to continue on the parkway for 55 miles at 40 MPH with stops every 10 minutes, or we could cruise into town the short way, 35 miles, at 70+ MPH.  We took the quick way because we were eager to get to our hotel.

We used two free night certificates that Chris had from gathering points at the Holiday Inn chain.  We chose to stay at the Hotel Indigo which is part of the Holiday Inn chain since the free night certificates allow us to stay at pricier places.  The Hotel Indigo is a fairly new chain with only a few properties (31 worldwide) and they call themselves boutique hotels.  We like this chain but unfortunately due to the cost we only stay when we have free nights.  They usually have very spacious rooms, hardwood floors (not real hardwood, more like laminate), huge showers that you could fit a small family into at once, and good views.  They are usually centrally located in whatever city they are in.  The last one we stayed in was in San Diego, which was downtown with great views of the city and a cool rooftop bar.  The one in Asheville overlooks the city and the mountains and given our platinum status with the Holiday Inn chain we were upgraded to a corner room on the 6^th floor with views in two different directions.  As we were sitting in our hotel writing up yesterday’s report we read that Asheville is nicknamed Beer City, USA.  We will have to see what tomorrow brings.

The desk where the last two days' blogs were written from.

Camping and Other Stuff

We slept in a little bit once again and we ended up leaving the hotel sometime between 10:30 and 11.  We had no real final destination in mind for the day, we only knew that we would be camping tonight.  Chris did have two things on the agenda, one involved geocaching and the other was, to put it nicely, a freakshow. 

We drove north from the hotel only for about a half hour or so for our first stop which was for breakfast.  We ended up getting bagels at a place called Einstein Bagels which is a chain.  We are not sure if it is just in the Atlanta area or if they are more widespread, but we hadn’t seen them before yesterday.  We alo bought gas ($3.61/gallon) and we took this very disturbing picture:

When we picked up this vehicle we knew it was going to be pricey when it came to gas.  The worst part was that $100 didn’t fill the tank.  It automatically shut off at $100.  It was just about full but it might have been able to take another gallon or so.

The next stop was for a geocache.  Chris wants to find a geocache that was hidden in each month since the start of geocaching (May 2000).  We have 3 months to go.  We need to find a cache hidden in July, August, and September of 2000.  Turns out in Georgia, right on our way, are caches found in two of these months.  Lake Lanier (Lake Sidney Lanier officially), is a large reservoir 50 or so miles north of Atlanta.  The lake is quite large, about 59 square miles.  It is a very popular place for Atlantans (is that a word?) to get away for the weekend or the week.  From what we could tell, boating and fishing seem to be the most popular activities around the lake.  One of the caches is on an island in the lake and requires the use of a boat.  If you think $100 for gas is a lot of money you should have seen the price for a half a day of renting a boat.  We thought long and hard, Chris really wanted to go for it, but we ended up not going for the island cache.  We will get another shot, there are six other caches in the world that were hidden in July 2000, and 5 of them are in the USA.  Unfortunately the nearest one to home is in Michigan.  The cache we did end up finding did not require a boat.  It was a short hike along a nature trail along the shore of the lake.  This one was hidden in August 2000.  This is even rarer as there are only 3 geocaches on earth that were hidden in August 2000.  We parked the car, and even though it was still morning, it was quite hot.  From the parking lot the GPS said the cache was a quarter mile away but it took us almost a half hour to get to it as the trail meandered back and forth.  We found the cache, which was hidden in a fake rock, as to not be accidentally discovered by non-geocachers.  We then explored the shores of the lake a bit more before heading back to the car.

We then started driving north from there, with a second destination, which was to put it nicely, a freakshow.  The highway we were on eventually turned from an expressway to a state highway with a speed limit of 55 but given that it was quite rural, we were easily able to do 65-70.  Eventually it turned into a slower paced, narrower road cutting through hilly farmland and woods and 45 was about as fast as we could go.  We had no intention of drinking so early in the day but we saw signs for several wineries.  We decided to go to the first one we hit, but we would only go to one.  After seeing the first sign for the wineries (with no mileage indicated on the signs), we hit the Blackstock vineyards and winery.  It was probably 15 miles out of our way, at least we thought.  We were the only people at the winery, which is located in the foothills of the northern Georgia mountains.  The guy working there said that they were the largest grape grower in Georgia, but now that we have internet we are seeing that his statement may not be true.  The tastings were expensive, much more expensive than last week’s wine tasting, which had been free.  We paid $10 for one round of tastings.  They let you try 8 different wines, out of maybe a dozen or so.  We only got one tasting, given the high price.  Most of the wines were too dry for our taste but we did like one particular variety, which we ended up buying two bottles of.  We snapped a few pictures of the vineyards with the mountains in the background, then we were on our way.

The next stop had been scheduled.  We thought that the winery had put us 15 or more miles out of the way, but as it turns out, all of those backroads ended up being a short cut to where we were headed next.  The next stop was arguably the strangest place we have ever been to.  It was also the creepiest.  We went to the Babyland General Hospital which Chris had spotted a few weeks back while looking at the Delorme map of Georgia.  What’s Babyland General Hospital you ask?  Look it up.  You too will not believe your eyes when you read the details of this place.  To sum it up, Babyland is where Cabbage Patch Kids are born.  The staff is all dressed up as doctors and nurses.  Most of the visitors we saw were very much unlike us.  They were unlike us in that they all brought their Cabbage Patch Kids with them.  We didn’t have ours with us for one of three reasons:  Either we never had a Cabbage Patch Kid in the first place (Chris); Our Cabbage Patch Kid was either lost or thrown away sometime in 1985 or 1986 (Jackie); or even if we still had a Cabbage Patch Kid we don’t take them with us on vacation.  The people who we saw there all had their Cabbage Patch Kids with them.  In fact, they even carried them around like they were real babies.  Creepy.  We looked around but ended up leaving pretty quickly before someone talked to us.  We will say it again.  Google this place.  See what Wikipedia has to say.  All we can say is, wow.

After leaving Babyland we started to think about where we were going to end up for the night.  We knew we were going to be camping and we didn’t want to arrive at our campsite too late because we wanted time to enjoy ourselves before it got dark.  Before figuring out where we were headed we stopped at a Walmart to buy two cheap billows ($2.50 each) plus a towel ($3?).  We also bought some burgers to cook for dinner along with some other stuff.  Chris had downloaded a campground app about a year ago.  Best $2.50 we ever spent.  We found what seemed like a nice campground about 50 miles away on a lake which straddles the Georgia/North Carolina border.  What made this nice was that it was primarily for tenting only, which meant there would be no RVs.  We have nothing against RVs but we have found that campgrounds that cater to RV’ers are generally more commercialized and the tent sites are usually in not so nice locations of the campground, like in the middle of a field with no privacy and lots of sun, or they are clustered together, again offering no privacy.  Being primarily for drive up tenters we knew that there would be lots of privacy, the sites would generally be nicer, the campground would be quieter, and it would likely be cheaper since you aren’t paying for things like a pool, a video game room, electricity hook ups and internet service.  When we arrived at the campground on Chatuge Lake, we had the place to ourselves.  According to the campground app, the campground had opened for the season on May 1^st.  Today just happened to be May 1^st.  Of 100 sites, we counted only 4 occupied including ours.  This was good.  We were able to choose pretty much any site we wanted, so we chose one right on the lake.  Being that it was still early in the season the bugs were pretty much non-existent.  Another perk of coming this early in the season is that there was firewood everywhere.  The woods had not been stripped of every single piece of dead piece of wood.  Normally at a campground this size you either have to drive your car a mile or two outside the campground to get firewood off the ground or you have to buy it.  We didn’t have to do either today.  The other great thing about this campground was that it was very inexpensive. Since the campground was a National Park Service campground our National Parks pass allowed us to stay for half the price.  We paid $7.50 for the night instead of $15.  We probably could have stayed for free since the fee collection was honor system based but we didn’t want to chance it.  You never know when a ranger is going to come by and check for your permit.  So we ended up paying less for our nights’ stay than we did for our wine tasting.  We were also very lucky that it was so early and the season and so few people there that the showers and bathrooms were the cleanest we have ever seen.  We quickly set up the tent and started cooking dinner.  We were greeted by two very tame ducks, a male and female.  The female was very brave.  She ate bread right out of Jackie’s hands.  The male duck was a little less brave but he still would come within 2 feet or so of us to eat.  These animals would not go away.  Finally when two other ducks approached they became defensive and instead of trying to get our food they were more concerned with not letting the other ducks get our food, so they left us alone for a while.

After dinner we stayed up next to the fire for several hours.  It didn’t get really dark to the point where you needed a flashlight until about 10 PM.  We probably stayed up another half hour after that, drinking some coronas and sitting around our fire under the moonlight.  We finally hit the bed and it probably took us another several hours to get to sleep.  There was some kind of annoying bird that would not shut up all night.  We have no idea what it was but all we could remember was that we would remember its call for the rest of our lives.  At one point Jackie asked if I had a gun in the truck, which I did not.  And with that constant chirping of the same melody over and over again all night long, that we thought would be burned in our minds forever, now, as we write this, we cannot remember what it sounded like.  Jackie thinks she fell asleep for good at 5 AM.  Needless to say, we slept in again.

Our home for the night

We arrived here at a campground on  Chatuge Lake, which straddles the GA/NC border at about 530 tonight. We cooked some burgers, we set up a tent and now Jackie is feeding the ducks. More tomorrow.