Asheville, NC: August 7th, 2013 - The Biltmore House

The Biltmore House is famous for being the largest private residence in the entire United States.  It was built in the late 1800s and lived in in the early 1900s by the Vanderbilt family, known railroad tycoons - though it should be noted, the people that built and lived in this house were not themselves the tycoons.  They were the inheritors of the fortune of the tycoons.  Corneilus was the tycoon.  George was just lucky enough to be his grandson.

He caught some 1900s disease and died, and his daughter married into the Cecil family, who then lost a good chunk-o-change in the Great Depression.  To raise funds, the Cecils opened Biltmore for tourism, and the tradition carries on into the present day.

I didn't get the classic front-of-the-house picture that everyone gets, but if you Google Image search "Biltmore" you'll find more than enough pictures.  You'll recognize it if you've ever seen Richie Rich.

Here are a few closer shots, however:

It rained pretty heavily and steadily while we were there.

Had ice cream and poked around the horse-stables-turned-gift-shop:

Still raining.

They had a big ol' greenhouse.  I managed to get one picture before my phone, ever the asshole, decided to pretend its battery was dead and shut off.

It doesn't quite do the place justice.

The Biltmore Estate covers 8,000 acres of NC mountain land.  There's a winery toward the north end, which is far enough away that it necessitates a drive from the house itself.

It's a neat little quasi-village:

 The area was once the center of the Vanderbilt's booming milk cow enterprise, but converted into a winery sometime after the 50s when the advent of grocery stores made milk cow-ing no longer profitable.

We did the wine tour:

By that point it was nearing dinner time, so we went into the town of Asheville for food.

There was some sort of youth drum circle going on in the town square:

And some obligatory town square art:

Asheville's a very artsy place, if you've never been there.  Whole lotta beards and dreadlocks.  Any of my European friends wanting to visit a more liberal-minded town in the southern US, look no further.

That was all from that.  We spent the rest of the week at our mountains house, then returned to Charlotte that weekend.  Less than a week later, I was in a car and on my way to Louisville, to start my new life as a grad student.  And so ended the summer.