Biltmore Estates

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Next stop: our friends' place in North Carolina. No, they don't live at the Biltmore...silly! Jessi and Rachael, friends from San Diego and the Marine Corps, live in a small town outside of Greensboro. From there we went to the Biltmore together.

The mansion was amazing! The Biltmore is the largest home in America...and although we weren't allwoed to take any pictures of the inside, you can tell from the outside just how large it is. The main rooms are enormous, the bedrooms large, and the details modern for the time period. There were a couple of libraries, huge roomy quarters for the staff, and all kinds of small wonders like the artwork and wallpapers. Only a small amount of the home is open for touring, just because of the immense amount of time it would take to walk through the whole thing. The best part was probably the basement, with an indoor swimming pool, a bowling alley, changing rooms, and all of the behind the scenes areas like the kitchens and laundry rooms. Keep in mind the house was built in 1889.

We went with Jessi and Rachel, friends from USMC, and did the regular tour as well as a special rooftop tour. On this we learned a lot about the families, how much it costs to keep it running today (a $100 million per year budget!), and saw a lot of extra rooms as well as the grounds from the roof. We walked around up where the dome is, along the roofs to see the gargoyles and sculptures, and up around in the rooms where things are being refurbished and stored. Also, from the roof the scale of the grounds became ever more apparent, from the conservatory to the Blue Ridge mountains, and the wineries all the way to Biltmore Village. George Vanderbilt created Biltmore Village for his staff and it still thrives today with a hospital, gas stations, stores and commerce. Today it just seems like a regular town, not in any way connected to the estate.

After visiting the house, which actually opened to the public in 1930 (whoah!), we went down to the conservatory. After that, we drove a few miles to the winery and hop-skipped through the tour and displays to get to the wine tasting. Wine taster guy was awesome and, despite our possibly holding up the line, let us exceed the usual 5-wines-only rule and let us try as many as we wanted. Yum! We wrote some down and went on our way!

The rest of the stay was spent hanging out with Jessi and Rachel, as well as his brother and mom. We even got to see an old high school friend, Kate, for dinner one night. We got to see Jessi's jobsite (the boys played on the lift that he and his mom currently use to sandblast a watertower...see photos). We all went to the lake on the 4th of July to his friends' house and played on their boat with tubes and wakeboards. After, we could see the town's fireworks over the water and the men set off a bunch of their own on the dock. It was an awesome 4th of July!

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