Asheville Trip - Day Two: Biltmore, The Gardens

After the house tour, we grabbed a small bite to eat at their cafe (pretty decent food) and did a bit of shopping and then we went to explore the various formal gardens and the open pathways and trails. It was a beautiful day and the outdoors were simply gorgeous. 

 And here is an extraordinarily rare photo of the entire photo thanks to the very kind grandma who offered to take our photo.

I won't talk too much about the outdoor shots. I mostly took photos of the landscape and our family.

It was nearly impossible to get any good photos of Adelaide because she kept flapping her arms and pretending to be a bird. Or something.

Since it's winter, there weren't many flowers except for what was in the conservatory.

 Adelaide is about to fly away.

Oh look! I exist. Zara took this photo.

We then walked out to the bass pond and boat house and around the lake to a man-made waterfall.

Benjamin was just excited that we actually let him out of his carrier and/or stroller to walk around on his own. (I had him on my back in the carrier during our house tour so Adelaide could ride in the stroller. I had hoped he'd sleep through most of it, but he only napped for about 30 minutes of it.)

The view on the way back. We took the long way back and we were all tired after our walk.

We headed back to our car and tried to go home. But because of the high number of guests, they had traffic only going one way so we had to drive through almost the whole estate to get back to the exit so it took us FOREVER to just leave the estate. We went back to our AirBnB, ate dinner, and put the kids to bed. All in all, a pretty great day.

Asheville Trip - Day Two: Bitlmore, the House

Be warned: this post contains a lot of photos of Biltmore. A lot. So many that I'm going to break up our visit to Biltmore into three separate posts. This post will focus on the house itself with a few exterior shots of the house.

We had reservations to tour the house at 11:45am on Wednesday. Christmas is Biltmore's busiest season because they deck out the whole house for the holidays and reservations were definitely necessary. We had also wanted to do the Christmas lights at Biltmore (where they light up the whole house with candles and light the fireplaces) but that tour cost extra and the earliest tour they had was at 9PM so we had to pass.

Still, I don't think we missed too much. They still had all the Christmas trees inside the house on and we got to take our time through the house. And though our adult tickets were pricey (I got them discounted at Costco), the kids were all free. We did pay a little extra for the audio tour but it was worth it. (And they gave us a kid's audio tour for Zara for free because the guest services agent had an extra ticket which was very sweet.)

This little girl face cracks me up. She's got such a funny personality, even if she's obstinate and cranky most of the time these days.

We got to the estate early so we actually got a decent parking spot and then explored the grounds and gift shops a bit before heading to the house for our tour. In the 1880s, George Washington Vanderbilt, the grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad and transportation king, made frequent visits to the Appalachians and decided to build a summer home near Asheville.

It was modeled after French chateaus and was designed by the famous architect Richard Morris Hunt. The grounds and gardens were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (who famously designed Central Park). Biltmore has a total of 250 rooms including 33 bedrooms for family and guests, 43 bathrooms, 65 fireplaces, three kitchens and the all the latest technologies like elevators, forced-air heating, fire alarms, electricity, and an intercom system. It was opened to guests on Christmas Eve 1895. George married his wife Edith in 1898 and their only child, a daughter named Cornelia, was born there in 1900. She and her husband would later open Biltmore to the public in 1930 during the Great Depression to drum up tourism in the Asheville area. It's still privately owned by the family, but has operated as a house museum ever since.

After entering the entrance hall, the first thing you see if the winter garden, which has this amazing glass roof.  It was one of my favorite things in the whole house.

Next was the equally impressive banquet hall with a seven story high ceiling, Flemish tapestries from the 1500s, and a pipe organ. The table could seat up to 38.

We got a second view of the banquet hall near the end of our tour from the servant's wing. The Christmas tree they had in this room was gigantic, almost as tall as the ceiling itself. It had to be secured by a rope from the organ loft.

There were Christmas trees in all the rooms, sometimes multiple.  Most of them had antique toys around them as well. This one was in the breakfast room.

This is the salon, although it was never finished in George's lifetime.

David was duly impressed by this extravagant lock box.

After passing through the music room, where Mrs. Vanderbilt once stored priceless art pieces from the National Gallery during World War II, we entered the loggia where we were treated to stunning views of the grounds and mountains.

Luckily, our first day at Biltmore was beautiful, warm and clear. The next two days would turn much colder and windier.

Next up was my second favorite room in the house--the library. George had a great passion for books and his library contains just a portion of his 22,000 volume collection.

The ceiling was painted by Italian artist Giovanii Pellegrini in the 1720s and is entitled The Chariot of Aurora. It was originally in the Pisani Palace in Venice.

The next room was the tapestry gallery with three amazing 16th century tapestries representing charity, faith, and prudence. It also includes portraits of family members from the likes of John Singer Sargent and James McNeil Whistler.

The family used the room, which is long and narrow, as a place to enjoy refreshments and listen to music.

This absolutely massive iron lighting fixture extends up all four stories.

There's some crazy people in that mirror right there.

We next went up to the second floor which included the family's private bedrooms and sitting areas.

This is the Oak Sitting Room and it contained possibly my favorite decorative art piece--that blue and white lamp on the desk. There were a lot of far more stunning and impressive art pieces, but I just loved that blue lamp.

The third floor had a variety of guest rooms of varying sizes, decor, and configurations. This was the damask room on account of its damask wallpaper and furnishings.

This was from the Louis XV room which was richly decorated in this heavy burgundy velvet wallpaper and drapery. The windows in this room were particularly unique but I unfortunately didn't get a great shot of it. This room is important because it is where Edith Vanderbilt gave birth to her daughter Cornelia and where Cornelia in turn gave birth to her two sons.

This room was perhaps the most unexpected. They call it the Halloween Room though it has no association with Halloween. (I think it's on account of the black cats and moon.) It's in the basement (and now has an exhibit on the construction of the house) but it was painted by Cornelia and her friends during a party for New Year's Eve in 1925.

The also had their own two lane bowling alley.

And highly unusual for the time--an indoor swimming pool. There were also several dressing rooms lining the hallway into the swimming pool and gymnasium. They said that the last time they filled the pool, they all went to bed and woke up in the morning and all the water was gone because there's a leak somewhere. So they haven't filled it up again. The electric lights at the bottom of the pool are original.

Most of the servant's quarters are located on the fourth floor but there were a few quarters on the bottom floor.

The main kitchen. (There were three kitchens.) The copper pots are all original. There were also several pantries and storage areas, a laundry, and a walk-in refrigerator.

 The last part of the tour covered the bachelor's wing which included the billiard room, smoking room, and gun room.

After George Vanderbilt's untimely death in 1914 (due to complications following an appendectomy), his widow and daughter sold some of the land and moved into this wing of the house. 

After the house tour, we wandered through their gardens, but I'm going to do that as a separate post since this one has been so long so far. 

Asheville Trip - Day One

After Christmas, we took a quick four day trip to Asheville, North Carolina. It's been on my list of places to visit for awhile, mostly for the expansive Biltmore Estate, America's largest private residence, built by George Washington Vanderbilt between 1889 and 1895. I'll talk more about Biltmore later, but first up, day one of our trip.

Asheville is only a 3.5-4 hour drive away but there were several places I wanted to stop at on our way there and back. We didn't make it to one--Tallulah Falls State Park--because it was too rainy and cold to endure a 2.5 mile hike to the falls. Otherwise, we checked off most of our to-see list including several rather unique locations.

Our first stop was Babyland General Hospital located in Cleveland, Georgia. It's literally in the middle of nowhere, located at the end of a road that stops at this large stately looking building. But what it really is is a giant gift shop for Cabbage Patch Dolls.

That's right. It's home to your '80s childhood right here. Several of my friends had mentioned Babyland with a laugh and said it was totally worth the visit if you were in the area. My mom had given me several of my old Cabbage Patch dolls to play with and I thought it would be interesting to check it out especially since it's free to enter. 

 

In many ways, it feels like it hasn't been updated since the '80s, at the height of Cabbage Patch's power. All the employees wear nurse's uniforms and scrubs, they sit in rocking chairs "burping" the babies, and there's even a station where you can watch a new baby being "born" in the cabbage patch and help them name it.

It's a totally surreal and amusing experience.

But they know their audience, so there's lots of stations to play with the dolls and lots of assessories, toys, and dolls to purchase. The kids had fun looking at everything and playing with the variety of toys they had available. 

We managed to make it out of there without purchasing anything and then ate our pre-packed lunch in the car since it was raining and we couldn't use one of their picnic tables. They did have lovely bathrooms though. 

 

So all-in-all, I thought Babyland was an amusing side trip but it wouldn't have been worth it to drive all the way there just for that. Luckily, it was only 15 minutes away from our second stop--Helen, Georgia.

Helen is a small town of 500 nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. It was formerly a logging town, but as that industry declined and the town started to fade in the late 1960s, they transformed their mountain town into a Bavarian village. All the buildings have adopted the look and feel of a southern German town.

Most of the restaurants serve German food and they are obviously a popular destination for Oktoberfest. They have several unique stores with hand-made, local items and of course a Hansel and Gretl Candy Store where we stopped for some treats, including a chocolate covered caramel apple which was quite delicious.

We wandered through the village and into several of the shops and up to their little hillside park. It was rainy with a constant drizzle so we didn't spend too much time there.

It was all pretty small with nothing really remarkable, but it was a fun little town to visit. I think I would have been disappointed by both Helen and Babyland if we had driven all that way just for them, but since they were on the way to Asheville, I thought they were fun little diversions and I'm glad we visited so that I can check those off our list. 

After finishing up in Helen, we clambered back into the car for the mountainous drive through the Appalachians to Asheville. We arrived in Asheville around 5PM and went to their one and only Trader Joe's to pick up snacks and supplies for our stay. We opted to stay in another AirBnB for our trip because it's nice to have a whole house to ourselves with access to a kitchen and multiple rooms. It's easier to put the kids to bed that way and it saves us on food since we don't have to eat out every meal. Plus the AirBnB was just as expensive (if not cheaper) than most of the hotel options so it worked out well. We stayed in an Arts and Craft bungalow that was conveniently located near the Biltmore. The owner has a kid so the home had lots of toys for the kids to play with including an entire attic space accessed by a set of spiral stairs that the kids loved but which I hated. We ate some dinner and put the kids to bed and prepared for our next day's adventures--Biltmore itself.