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| The Biltmore House |
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| Looking down the Esplanade |
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| A dance pose in front of the house |
On Thursday we headed to Ashville North Carolina to visit the Biltmore House. A few years back Emily and I had been to 'The Breakers', another Gilded Age Vanderbilt house up in Newport Rhode Island, so we were curious to see what an even larger Vanderbilt Estate would be like. The house is huge, 250+ rooms for a total of 175,000 square feet. The house has a bowling alley, indoor pool, gym and various other entertainment rooms for late 19th\early20th century life. In addition to the main house was the carriage house, the massive gardens, the farm fields and the forest, for a total of 8,000 acres. Just enough to get the Gilded Age ultra wealthy by. As large and as impressive as the house was, it wasn't as opulent and over the top in interior furnishings as The Breakers was. The Biltmore had nice furnishings and was very extravagant, but to us didn't seem as extravagant as the much smaller Breakers house. We toured the house, had lunch at the Stable Cafe (a cafe in the old stable house, walked the gardens, drove through the estate lands and headed back towards the Smoky Mountains.
We traveled back to the park via the Blueridge Mountain Parkway. It is very scenic and I can image that if you tried to drive the entire parkway, which is some 469 miles up to the Shenandoah National Park, it would take forever with all the scenic pull outs and, curves and max speed of 35-45 miles per hour.We were on a 30 mile section that took probably an hour and a half to traverse.
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| Water diversion at stream for old mill |
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| Old mill |
Once in the park our first stop was a late 19th century mill powered by the nearby stream It was fun to see how they diverted the water and used it to power the mill to grind corn and flour. You could even buy ground corn and flour there if you wish.
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| The pose |
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| The river |
Our second stop was an old wooden bridge over the river where the girls decided to play on the rocks and a do some poses for the camera.
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| Em and I at one of the view points on the road. |
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| On the dome with NC in the background |
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| The walk up to Clingmans Dome |
The penultimate stop was Clingmans Dome, the highest point in Tennessee and in the park, where on a clear day you would have a 360 degree view of the mountains. It was not clear. We could see back into North Carolina, but not into Tennessee.
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| Looking out over North Carolina from Clingmans Dome. You can see the "smoke" on the right, it stretched all the way around the Tennessee side. |
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| Standing in Two States. |
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| Carolina in the background from Newfound Gap |
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| One of the many sunset shots we took |
The final stop was at Newfound Gap, the dividing line between North Carolina and Tennessee where we saw a beautiful sunset before heading down the mountain and back to the room.
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| Yet another dance pose |
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