Day 18 - The Biltmore Estate

 

Tuesday - May 24, 2022

Weather - Mostly sunny with a high of 74 degree - very nice!

Steps - Shaun:  10,346, Shannon:  10,201

Varmints - Bunnies galore and a lone deer in the yard

Sorry about how crappy the picture is, but I was taking it through a very dirty window!

Today we had scheduled a behind-the-scenes tour of the Biltmore Estate, as well as a viewing of the Monet and Friends presentation that was much the same as the Van Gogh one we each saw in our respective cities (but we like Monet a lot better than Van Gogh, so we were excited!).

This is the view from the back porch of the house.  Incredible isn't it?

We got up at 7:30, had breakfast, saw a cute little deer out the window of the cottage, and headed back down the mountain and south to Asheville. We arrived in plenty of time for our 90-minute tour, and boy was it wonderful! We had a very learned docent named Wilma, and the other great thing about just the logistics of the tour was that everyone had their own little speaker that allowed Wilma to talk right into our ears. This really helped when we passed through areas where everyone else was making noise. I wish all tours would use this technology!

Let's just lay out a few basic facts about the Biltmore Estate first, shall we? It is the largest privately held home in the United States that started out as a dream of George Vanderbilt's to build a 6,000-square-foot hunting lodge but wound up becoming a 175,000-square-foot gigantic French chateau (no, that's not a typo). The property was once 125,000 acres, which included all of Mount Pisgah, but at some point about 85,000 acres were sold to the federal government and is now a part of the Pisgah National Forest. There are 250 total rooms, 35 of which are bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, and 65 fireplaces. Every finish is first class, and it's a marvel of wood, metal, and stone. Let me tell you, it's quite a house!

The tour took us to many places we would have never gotten to see, but it also left out many of the places that could be seen from the normal audio tour, so we had a wonderful lunch in the café in the converted stables, and then we went back into the house and took the audio tour so that we could see everything we had missed.

This gave us an hour or so to get out to the venue where the Monet presentation was being held, so we just hung out there until we could get in. We enjoyed all the pretty pictures (which lasted about 45 minutes), as well as the information about all the artists and the history of their lives. However, it wasn't done as well as the Van Gogh exhibit because the pictures weren't projected onto the entire floor, creating the immersive quality we had experienced with the Van Gogh one, and there were weird transitions where the screens just displayed a color. One thing that bothered Shannon in particular as well was that they were dispensing a fragrance in the room to create a multi-sensory experience, but the smell just caused her to sneeze and her nose to run. Probably not the kind of experience they were going for. All-in-all, it was a bit disappointing, but we still enjoyed it.

After the Monet exhibit, we drove into Asheville and picked up some Italian carry out and then went to a pizza place we'd been to in Cleveland called the Mellow Mushroom, and it had vegan cheese for Shaun! It was a lovely meal, and now we have dinners to last through the rest of the trip. We've decided to go back to the Biltmore tomorrow since we didn't get a chance to see the gardens, and then we'll go through downtown Asheville to see what's what.