Haven't Met Laverne and Shirley Yet But Otherwise I'm Enjoying Milwaukee

It occurred to me this morning, after having been in Milwaukee for about a day and a half, that what I like about this city is its complete lack of pretension, the sense that it is completely comfortable with itself.  "I'm Milwaukee," the city proclaims, "I'm an old industrial town with factory buildings and a City Hall that were built when people cared about how factory buildings and a City Hall looked, and I celebrate that history.  I'm full of people - both new residents and long-timers - with names that are hard to spell and harder to pronounce, and we make stuff that people want, like motorcycles and beer.  You may think that's hard to do nowadays but it's been hard for a hundred years so we're used to it.  And we like to play hard, too.  We're not Chicago and that doesn't bother us at all.  We're Milwaukee.  Welcome."

So between that attitude, relatively few nasty drivers, and the fact that I've been able to generally figure out how to find my way around, I really like Milwaukee.  A lot.

Of course, first impressions are the longest-lasting and it didn't hurt Milwaukee's cause at all that the night I arrived I had dinner at Three Brothers Restaurant, courtesy of a recommendation from Aunt Connie and Uncle Bill's Roadfood book.  This was an old Schlitz company bar, apparently, and there's a Schlitz globe sign on the outside of the building.  I was told by some guys I met the next day that two of the brothers have passed on, but I can assure you that the remaining brother does a great job.  This is a Serbian restaurant - who knew there was such a thing as Serbian food?  There is, and it seems to be a cross between Greek and German.  Here's the bar and some of the tables.  It's a one-room restaurant.  You can see Hannah, the incredibly friendly and helpful waitress, zipping by no doubt bringing me the wonderful rye bread that goes along with the wonderful Serbian salad (chopped tomatoes, onions and green peppers) and the wonderful Serbian wine.  It's a very retro-looking place, but without any hint of being self-conscious and certainly no desire to be kitschy.

I don't blog a lot about food, partly because I don't want to reinforce how much time I spend thinking about food, but this meal was definitely blogworthy.  It was lamb in a green pepper, rice, carrots and cabbage that was very close to sauerkraut. 

Delicious doesn't even begin to describe the meal.

It's been unseasonably cold here - not quite as bad as Minneapolis, but let's just say that my walking around downtown was brisk and focused.  They have a beautiful Riverwalk with a lot of cafes.  One can imagine how much fun they are during the warmer months.  Not so much in a colder-than-normal March.

They have a lot of museums here, and I've been to a few.  The first was the Grohmann Museum at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.  It's a large collection of paintings and bronze sculptures with the common theme of people working.  There are people working in industry, agriculture, construction, medicine, the law....you name it, they've got a painting of it.  The museum was created by Dr. Eckhart Grohmann, a Milwaukee businessman and MSOE trustee, as a place to publicly display his collection.  The museum's materials refer to him as an "avid art collector."  You can say that again.  I didn't count but the paintings take up most of a three story building.  There's a rooftop sculpture garden (like the Riverwalk, nicer in the less inclement months) and some beautiful stained glass. 

When you walk in, there's a tile mosaic which is currently half-covered to protect it from snow and salt.  This shot is taken from the second floor.

There's a mural on the ceiling in the entranceway, also featuring men and women working.

A really nice MSOE senior named Sam gave me a book about the museum and told me not to miss their special exhibit, a collection of bridge photographs by David Plowden.  These are lovely black and white pictures, many of them taken thirty or forty years ago.  Their subjects are all sorts of bridges from across North America.  I was thrilled to see a photograph of the old Nebraska City Bridge that crossed the Missouri River, built in 1888 and torn down in 1984.  I've become quite enamored of bridges during the Driveabout, and it was fun to see this exhibit. 

The great thing is, since this is a School of Engineering, the photographs and paintings are often accompanied by some sort of engineering or scientific information about their activity.  For instance, I now know more about what a cable-stayed bridge is, like the ones I saw in Louisiana and South Carolina.

The Milwaukee City Hall is gorgeous but hard to photograph because it's so big.  It's stone on the outside (being renovated) and marble on the inside.  This doesn't really do a good job of showing you.  It's no Allen County Courthouse, but it's impressive.

Then I went looking for the Bronze Fonz, which I knew I'd hear about if I didn't give you a report.  This was probably the only disappointment I've had on the Driveabout.  It was so disappointing (and so cold) that I didn't even take a picture.  Look, I've never seen Henry Winkler in person but the man has to be taller than 5'4" which is how tall I am.  The statue looked to be about 2/3 scale - shorter than me.  I don't really get the point of putting up a mini-me of Da Fonz - I mean, either do it or don't do it, but if you do it, let's do it right.  Plus the face is creepy.  I am going to forgive Milwaukee for this because, well, one forgives one's friends for occasionally doing ridiculous things.

I popped into the Milwaukee Historical Society.  They are in between exhibits, but their building is amazing enough.  It's a 100-year-old bank building that is probably the most beautiful bank building I've ever seen.  Particularly when the sun is shining in as it was when I was there, the room gleams.

There are several vaults, as one might expect.  One contains some pictures and information about a lady named Maryann Kwapiszewski.  A seamstress and single mother in the 1920's and 1930's, she supported her family by making moonshine during Prohibition.  She also ran a gambling operation, offering free meals to patrons who then stayed for cockfights, generally followed by more drinks.  This combination of gambling and alcohol worked out pretty well for her, although presumably less so for her patrons and still less well for the roosters.  She put her three sons through medical school and was apparently never caught by law enforcement.  After Prohibition ended she made her own moonshine and ran for public office.

In another vault, they have a likeness of the Milwaukee City Hall built out of 10,000 red legos.  Seriously.  We are in Wisconsin, Land of the Odd, after all.

Then began my Afternoon of Beer.  I should just go ahead and say that this was followed by a Late Afternoon Nap, which is the real reason I typically don't drink early in the day.

For lunch I had local cheese and local sausage and a glass of Schlitz.  All were tasty.  Trip Advisor said that the Lakefront Brewery tour was the best brewery tour in Milwaukee and that seemed too good to pass up.  I've never been on any other brewery tour, so I can't really compare, but this one was awfully good.  Our tour guide Brewery Navigation Specialist, Josh, was a very funny 20-something guy who not only told us all about the history and science of beer and the history of Lakefront Brewery, but led us all in a rousing rendition of the theme song to Laverne and Shirley.  And their beer is very good, too.

Here is Josh, demonstrating the bottling process.

While waiting for the tour to start, I met Richie, Mike and Paul, who were hanging out having a beer.  We started talking about traveling and Richie said that he and his wife were hitchhiking back from California once and ended up having to get a ride in Council Bluffs, Iowa, from I-80 into town so they could put on more clothes because it was that cold.  Paul talked about riding freight trains (underneath the cars) at 80 m.p.h. in the cold.  Neither Mike nor I had a story that could compete with that one.  Made me appreciate the Trusty Vue and Sleep Inns even more.

Brewery Navigation Specialist Josh said that he was going to be in a comedy show that evening.  Having no other plans after my nap, I went.  This was a very new group, operating in the basement of a downtown mall, and although I wasn't the oldest person there, I think I was the oldest person there who wasn't a parent of one of the performers.  As an example, one of the comedians kept talking about how his dad loves the Eagles, because everybody's dad loves the Eagles, and I mostly just sat there and thought about seeing the Hotel California tour in ninth grade.  Without my dad.  During intermission I started talking with a young woman - turns out she is part of a four woman comedy troupe but I won't be in town to see them perform - and mentioned the "age thing."  She quickly attempted to identify with me by saying, "Yeah, that's really younger than me, too - my dad is into CCR."  I appreciated her thoughtfulness, and the fact that it missed the mark by over a decade really just made me smile.

I've been trying to be good, at least for the past couple of days, about using the hotel fitness center, so this morning I did that and then went to the Harley-Davidson Museum.

Where to begin?  How about at the beginning.  This is the motorcycle they call Serial Number One, which was the first bike built by Harley and Davidson in a 10' by 14' shed in Davidson's backyard in 1903.

You will not be surprised to learn that the museum has an incredible collection of motorcycles.  Here is the first one, from 1925, where they were able to redesign the bike to have a lower seat (compare the seat position to Serial Number One.)

When the Depression hit, the company had tough times.  They weren't able to invest in new technology so they focused on aesthetics instead.  This is one of the earliest models (1936) where they used cool colors to enhance the appearance.

As a company-owned facility, I thought they did a reasonable job of describing the "dark days" of the 1970's when they were owned by AMF before being bought by management in a highly leveraged 1981 acquisition.  They narrowly avoided bankruptcy in 1985 and went public in 1986.  To me this discussion, along with how the company started 110 years ago, was the most interesting part of the museum but most people probably just like to see (and hear) the bikes.  Either way, it's a good time.

My Minnesota friend, Barb, told me that a friend of hers said I shouldn't miss the Public Market - another good call from Barb.  It's not huge but it's big enough, with bakers, wine sellers, gourmet foods of all types - and a really nice atmosphere.  Again, I'm soft on Milwaukee.

Tonight I am off to a play that is part of a Young Playwright program.  I neglected to ask the lady at the theater whether "young" meant "new" or "juvenile."  I guess I'll find out.

Oh, I saw a sign for a bar called La Perla that I had to include for you, just to continue the "Weird Wisconsin" theme.  I don't think that any comment is needed.  Like the rest of Milwaukee, it is what it is.

Keep Wisconsin Odd

You all know my thoughts about the widely perpetuated theory that Austin (Texas) is weird:  it's really not.

But one place that does seem to have more than its fair share of the odd and the unusual - I wouldn't always say weird, exactly - is Southern Wisconsin.

Exhibit A:  House on the Rock.  This is a house.  A big house.  Built on a rock.  A big rock.  And it's full of crazy collections of stuff ranging from glassware to carousel ponies.  I'd been there years ago so didn't stop this trip, but no discussion of Wisconsin's oddities can begin anywhere else.  If you've never been there, go.

For many states, House on the Rock would be odd enough, and people might be satisfied by rounding things out with a couple of goofy stores to be considered weird.  But not Wisconsin.  No, for Badgers, House on the Rock is simply a beginning.  It's inspiring.

Take nature.  Don't get me wrong - Wisconsin is a beautiful place.  And I've never seen any natural features as weird as those in West Texas.  Still, it's odd to be driving along and see giant rocks protruding from the earth with nothing else around them but a few trees.

This is near Fort Douglas which appears to have no particular reason to exist other than a couple of gas stations and being near the trailhead for the Omaha Bike Trail.

Of course, that is plenty of reason to exist as far as I'm concerned.  This trail is apparently a rails-to-trails project so it's not very hilly, and they say that it goes through a tunnel which also sounds cool.  Actually, this week it sounds darned cold, as does anything that involves being outside for any period of time.  Perhaps I'll put that on the list for my next trip to the northland.

Wisconsin has a town named Baraboo, which you'll have to admit is an odd name.  It is home to Circus World, a large circum museum housed in the area that used to be the winter quarters for Ringling Brothers Circus.  The Ringling Brothers lived here in the late 1800's, and five of them started the circus.  One of the brothers, Otto, was the business genius of the family, and that helped the company grow from a fairly small enterprise to a very large one.  There are exhibits about each brother, and Otto's includes the caption "Shrewd Main of Principle:  Honesty and Other Successful Policies."  I find that whole line to be very funny but I'm having trouble explaining why.

Anyhoo, back in the late 19th century circuses were pretty shady places and not cheating (or flat out stealing from) your customers was actually an innovation that Ringling Brothers brought to the business.  They hired uniformed police officers to stand around to make people feel safer.

You may be curious about Otto's "other successful policies."  Immediately under the sign about honesty, there is a panel that describes how the Ringlings controlled a large share of the circus market by 1911, through a combination of acquisition (they bought Barnum & Bailey) and negotiated market splitting arrangements with other circuses to avoid "costly billing wars" and "competing in the same towns."  This is a "successful policy" that some socialistic do-gooder might call "monopoly" and which said socialistic do-gooder might consider to be anti-consumer.  But hey, it was successful.

Strained ethics aside, Circus World was a good stop, even in very cold weather.  It would be more fun during the summer, when a large number of outside activities are available.  As it was, I ran as fast as my icy little legs would carry me from the main building to the W.W. Deppe Circus Wagon Pavilion and stayed in the unheated building as long as my icy little fingers would let me.  It was well worth the risk of frostbite, as it is the largest collection of circus wagons in the world.

Their collection includes wagons about virtue:

America:

Foreign lands:

Animals, and general splendor:

There are several dozen wagons from a variety of circuses, and they're all impressive.

Circuses aren't exactly odd, but they have some odd characteristics (and odd characters, for that matter) so I think Circus World fits in my "Unusual Wisconsin" theme.

(While at Circus World I saw a sign put up by the Wisconsin tourism people, advertising all the historical landmarks in Wisconsin, and it said, "Find your place in history and go there."  I absolutely love that.)

Actually, I hadn't planned to go to Baraboo.  My friend Deb had told me about this place called "Forevertron" which is a bunch of sculptures made from scrap metal (we're back on the "odd" theme now.)  Trip Advisor told me that it was just south of Baraboo, sort of on the way to Madison, and it was on the way to Forevertron that I discovered Circus World.  This seems to be the way things always happen.

You might argue with me over whether Circus World is weird but there can be no disagreement about Forevertron.  Let's start with the directions:  "About five miles south of Baraboo on U.S. 12, behind Delaney's Surplus, across the highway from the Badger Army Ammunition Plant."  These are only slightly better directions than my father gave me to find the house in Marksville where he last lived 65 years ago.

When you get there, here's the first thing you see.

There are several similar sculptures made from old and very large pieces of metal.  But the real reason to stop is to see Forevertron itself, advertised as the largest scrap metal sculpture on earth.  (There's a lot of focus in this part of Wisconsin on being the biggest.  It's that Midwestern lack of self-confidence, I think.)

Tragically, the way you see Forevertron is by going into a scrap yard that is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.  Since I was driving through on Wednesday, all I could do was peak through the fence.  The statue, I believe, is the thing that looks a little like a steeple in the middle of the picture, in the back.

Not such a great shot and I was disappointed.  Still, if I hadn't been looking for Forevertron I'd not have found Circus World, so everything worked out okay.

I'd planned to spend a day or two in Madison.  Luckily, my friend Barb told me that while Madison is a pretty town, Milwaukee is much more interesting.  She was right.  Madison is new and clean and bright and shiny.  Milwaukee is old and grimy and industrial and ethnic.  In other words, it's real and can therefore be loved.  You've all read The Velveteen Rabbit, right?  (If you haven't, consider that to be your homework for the day.)

I arrived in Milwaukee just in time for rush hour, as has become my habit, and instantly liked the place.  You'll have to wait a while to hear more details.

Wars, Pianos, Harry Blackmun and a Duplex

Many museums are closed on Mondays, including the Minnesota History Center, so Tuesday turned into St. Paul Museum Day.

First stop, the Minnesota History Center with friends Don and Jini.  This is the gigantic Minnesota state museum near the State Capitol in St. Paul.  Here's the capitol, photographed from the museum, just to prove I'm not misleading you.  And to prove that I can correctly use the word "capitol" which has only one meaning:  the building that houses a government.

It's a capital capitol.  And that is today's grammar lesson.

The Big New Exhibit at the History Center is about Minnesota and the Civil War.  When I think about the Civil War - and I've done so a fair amount in the past few weeks - I don't think about Minnesota.  And, of course, no Civil War battles were fought here (although there was a war fought in the state in 1862 - see below).  But Minnesotans were among the first Americans to sign up to support the Union, and as a result took very heavy casualties since the first several years of the Civil War were particularly bad for the North.

Commemorating the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the museum has assembled a large amount of memorabilia - clothing, weapons, photographs, mementos - just for this exhibit which will only be around until the fall.  If you're in the area at all, you should go.

There were two highlights for me.

First, they have a flag from the 28th Virginia Infantry which was captured in 1862 by a soldier from St. Paul during Pickett's Charge (arguably the only bright spot for the North during the Battles of Gettysburg).  Over the years, the Minnesota Historical Society ended up with it and maintained the flag in honor of the Minnesotans who gave their lives during the war.  In 1998, some Civil War reenactors from Roanoke, Virginia, wanted it back, citing a 1905 Congressional resolution that ordered the Federal War Department to return all captured Confederate flags.  The matter was duly considered by the Minnesota Attorney General who declined to return it.  Being a Minnesotan, I'm sure he was very polite about it.  He may have even sent some sort of pastry as a consolation, but the flag is still in St. Paul.  Never confuse "nice" with "pushover."  (I think it's funny that this matter was apparently up to the Minnesota Attorney General in the first place.  It seems like he might not have been completely neutral in his legal analysis.  But I'm just speculating and hey, who said that life was fair?)

The second highlight wasn't part of the exhibit but it was learning that Don's grandfather (grandfather) fought in the Civil War, as did his grandmother's brother.  (This is chronologically possible because both Don's grandfather and father were in their late 40's when they had Don's father and Don.)  In fact, his grandmother's brother was called a "train stealer," a Union soldier who snuck into the South to sabotage rail lines and rolling stock.  It is most remarkable to know an actual living person who is so close to a war that was not only 150 years ago but that was possibly the most important single historical event in our nation's history after the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

I hinted above that there was a war fought in Minnesota during the Civil War.  It was the Dakota War of 1862 and was between Dakota Indians and white settlers.  The vast majority of the 600 white people who were killed were unarmed homesteaders.  The number of Dakota who died was much smaller, but over a quarter of the Dakota people who surrendered died the following year in the diaspora that followed, with thousands of Dakota moving/being moved from their lands to reservations, often several states away.  It's a very good exhibit, and very depressing.

After that, Jini and Don and I needed something a bit more positive, and we found it in an exhibit about, of all things, a house.

The house is 470/472 Hopkins Avenue, in east St. Paul, and was sort of randomly chosen by the museum as a method to show that everyday people are part of history.  The home was built in the 19th century by a family named Schumacher who were upper middle class German immigrants and who lived there as a single family residence.  In 1923, the family sold it to two Italian cousins who converted it to a duplex, one side for each cousin's family.  This part of St. Paul became a "Little Italy" in the 1930's with lots of Italian immigrants.  After World War II the building was converted to a triplex and has housed people with a variety of ethnic backgrounds, including the Hmong people who resettled in the Twin Cities following the Vietnam War.  The Open House exhibit attempts - with a large amount of success - to track down the names of everyone who's ever lived there and interview a number of people.  It's a very interesting concept for an exhibit and really helps someone understand his or her city's history.

Here's part of the exhibit:

The next day, you may not be shocked to learn that I tracked down the house:

As I took the picture, I wondered whether the people who live there now have gotten used to local history nerds photographing their house.  Or, perhaps, I'm the only one.  Hard to say.

One last shot of the History Center, for Jini's sake, because she wanted me to represent Minnesota in my chronicle of aviation history. You see, Charles Lindbergh was from Minnesota.  I didn't know that, but when I thought about it I realized, "his name is Lindbergh - of course he's from Minnesota."  The museum has Lindbergh's early plane, Jenny.



After a delicious lunch, I bid goodbye to Jini and Don and decided to spend the afternoon taking in a bit more of St. Paul.  This whole traveling thing is made a lot easier by the existence of the Interwebs and, more specifically, mobile technology.  There's a great website/app called Trip Advisor where you can just hit a couple of buttons on your smartphone and voila, there's a list of things to do in your area plus reviews of them by other travelers.  Using this, I found the Landmark Building in downtown St. Paul which is home to a couple of actual museums and a ton of history.

The building was originally the Federal Courthouse, and is actually where Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun began his judicial career.  There are still some federal offices there, along with a number of non-profits, two of whom have small museums.

My initial reason for going was to see the Schubert Club Museum of Musical Instruments.  I'm still unclear as to what exactly the Schubert Club is, but the museum itself includes a number of historic pianos.  For instance, the first grand piano, built by John Broadwood in the late 18th century.

Or Liszt's favorite piano:

Or pianos that are just beautiful:

But as luck would have it, the Schubert Club wasn't even my favorite museum in the building, because the Landmark Building is also home to the American Association of Woodturners.  They have a small museum featuring lathed pieces by their members.  Beautiful work.  These pictures won't do them justice but they give you an idea.

Both museums are technically free but they do accept donations.

The rest of the building is also a museum of sorts, with signs all around explaining some of the historical events that occurred here.  Here's a surprise:  I was intrigued by a Supreme Court antitrust case involving the railroads.  James J. Hill, St. Paul's biggest businessman at the turn of the century and owner of a couple of railroads (you can tour his mansion on Summit Avenue but I didn't - after all, I've already been to Biltmore) got into a bidding war with Edward Harriman (of the Union Pacific) over control of Hill's companies and Hill created a holding company (also called a trust) to prevent this from happening again.  Teddy Roosevelt's Justice Department sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act and the lawsuit went to the Supreme Court which ruled that the holding company posed a direct restraint of interstate commerce and thus violated the Act.  Depositions for this case were taken in the St. Paul Federal Building.  Anyway, I think that's very cool but we established long ago that I am a nerd.

Because of the freakishly late winter, there were some things in the Twin Cities I didn't get to go (i.e., things that required going outside), so I imagine I'll make a point of returning some year in July, after the snow has mostly melted.

Girl in the North Country

You'd need a calendar to know that Thursday is supposed to be the first day of spring.  I mean, you're not going to remember it just by looking outside and for sure you're not going to know it by stepping outside.

My friend Barb, who's lived in Minneapolis for more than a decade, says that by mid-March it's supposed to be in the 30's and 40's here.  I want to tell her that saying this to me is preaching to the choir and she really needs to direct her comments to Mother Nature, but that seemed rude, particularly since I am her house guest.  And after all, she has to go out in this stuff and I don't.  Anyway, I really didn't expect great weather when I decided to pop up to Minnesota in March, and it's safe to say those expectations have been met.

But beyond the weather, it's been a great trip.  I've seen a couple of wonderful museums and had all sorts of culinary adventures.

The Museum of Russian Art is the only museum dedicated to Russian art in the western hemisphere.  Their exhibits rotate every few months and I saw a collection of several dozen forged brass icons, a number of paintings from their permanent collection, and a large exhibit of modern Russian art.  You can't take pictures in the museum but the icons were so impressive that I wanted you to see them.  The one pictured on the left has blue enamel on it, and the others are most likely brass with gold added.

photo credit: www.TMORA.org

My paternal great grandparents came from Kiev, but my Russian heritage wasn't people to whom Christian icons spoke (other than possibly, "get out or we'll burn your house down").  Still, they're beautiful pieces.  (This summer the museum is bringing an exhibit called "Jews in Tsarist Russia" which should also be interesting.)

Apparently the museum's most popular painting is "Milkmaids - Novella:"

photo credit: www.TMORA.org

It's a large painting and I have to say it was my favorite as well.  It obeyed the "Socialist Realism" directive of the time that art had to show happy workers.  This picture does so, obviously.  But it's more than that: there's just something so universal and real about the women's smiles and laughter that the spirit is infectious.  And, of course, one can be as subversive as one wants to be in deciding what the women are laughing about.  So long as you kept that to yourself.

As you know, I love historical museums and have seen a bunch of them over the past four months.  It's difficult to pick a favorite, but for sheer depth of focus and height of elevators, it's really hard to beat the Mill City Museum.

In downtown Minneapolis, built in the ruins of the Washburn-Crosby Company's A Mill, the museum explains and documents the development of the flour industry which is arguably the basis for the city's existence - certainly it is the basis for the community's economic significance. 

Up until the mid-19th century, flour in the U.S. was milled from wheat grown in the southern part of the country which had a soft outer shell that was easily removed during processing.  The climate in Minnesota and the Dakotas wasn't conducive to planting such "winter wheat" (see my comments at the top of this post) and the kind of wheat that would grow around here is called Red Hard Spring Wheat.  That means it is planted in the spring and has a hard shell.  And it's red.  In about 1850 a couple of guys from New England, who had moved to Minnesota to harness the power of the Mississippi's only waterfall and make textiles, figured out the secret to milling hard wheat.  Even better, they learned that such wheat was superior for baking bread, and the next eighty years saw Minneapolis become the Flour Capital of the World.  One of the docents Cousin Susan and I spoke with, T.J., said that he felt that this site - the Washburn A Mill - was the most important building in Minneapolis history, since it was in this building that the milling process was developed.  The A Mill had exploded in 1878 (flour dust is more explosive than TNT - the explosion killed eighteen people, destroyed one-third of the area's milling capacity and was felt miles away) and was rebuilt in 1880.  General Mills (successor company to Washburn-Crosby) made Gold Medal Flour there until 1965, when the plant fell victim to decentralized production and was shuttered.  In 1991 a fire gutted the property but luckily, Susan explained, the head of the state historical society and the mayor worked to save the site and, in a sense, the city's history.

Part of the museum is called the Flour Tower.  You and about three dozen people sit in a small room and your docent explains that you'll be hearing former mill employees talk about what it was like to work there.  If you are among the dimmest of the patrons, as I was, it's not until then that you realize that you aren't in a small room so much as you are in a large elevator.  The "room" moves up and down to various floors and you see everything from the office to the boilers.  It is very cool.  The rest of the museum is very well done, too, with some exhibits for kids and lots of information about the history of the industry:  foreign trade, millwrights, Betty Crocker - the works. 

You also get an awesome view of the Mississippi River and Minneapolis.

Last but not least, there's a movie called "Minneapolis in 19 Minutes Flat."  It's an entertaining and very informative history of the city.  I will illustrate my respect for your intelligence by not describing the movie's length.

The area that became Minneapolis was identified by a priest named Hennepin when he came across what he called "St. Anthony Falls" - the only natural waterfall on the otherwise-very-flat Mississippi River.  Here's a picture of what the falls looked like before it was heavily developed:

Photo credit:  http://www.uh.edu/engines/earlystanthonyfalls.jpg

Here's what it looks like today:

Photo credit:  http://www.nps.gov/miss/planyourvisit/images/stAnthonyFalls.jpg

So if you're in the Twin Cities you definitely want to check out both The Museum of Russian Art and the Mill City Museum.  You will not be disappointed.

Of course, a person cannot only feed one's mind.  She must also feed her stomach and there are a lot of great places to do that in the Twin Cities, as you would expect.

We did have a little trouble with that Friday night, however.  My friend, Barb, and her husband, Tim, and I, spent quite some time trying to decide where to go to dinner.  There are too many choices, really.  We finally decided to try a new place called Piccolo's which had gotten rave reviews.  Their slogan is "putting what is seasonal and creative ahead of what is safe and familiar."  We're all for that!  Unfortunately, what we didn't realize until after we'd gotten settled in and ordered a bottle of wine is that they are into this whole "small plates" movement.  Friends, if you are like us and didn't understand what that means, it means that each dish has about the amount of food on it that you'd get from a waiter passing hors d'ouevres at a cocktail party.  Yes, I know that most American restaurants give you way too much food and generally I wish they'd serve smaller portions.  But there's a difference between a reasonable serving and a bite-sized morsel.  Once we realized this, Tim and I each ordered one plate and we told the waitress we would just be having that.  I've never seen a waitress change her disposition so quickly.  We wanted to say, "Look, dear, you did not have anyone else waiting for this table.  Treating us like something on the bottom of your shoe is not a good way to maximize your tip.  And did I mention I just ordered a ridiculously expensive bottle of wine?"  But this is Minnesota, after all, and we're all much too nice to say such a thing.  When we finally finished the wine and left (quickly - before we started laughing), we found a fabulous Greek place with food that did not need to be explained and in quantities that didn't make you look around for dessert.  And in Piccolo's defense, the food was delicious.  In a diminuitive sort of way.

Sunday morning we faced no such dilemma.  Barb said that we'd be going to this really good place, which she refused to describe, and Tim said we needed to leave in plenty of time to be in line when they opened at 10.  Great call on all counts.  They took me to the Triple Rock Social Club which is a punk bar (the Clash played here) that serves wonderful brunch on weekends.  This is no "small plates" place and the waitress had no sneering attitude.  She did, however, have a lot of facial tattoos.  I had the house specialty, called a Mother Trucker, which included home fries covered in cheddar cheese (real cheese, not some nasty cheese sauce).  Awesome - and I needed that much food to help counteract an extremely strong Bloody Mary.

Then we walked through the Como Park Conservatory because it was very nice to get in from the cold.

That's not all of Minneapolis, of course - Cousin Susan took me into the Guthrie Theater and Barb took me to a great international market and I spent Friday driving around seeing all sorts of places and eating at Cecil's Deli - and I'm not done yet.  Tomorrow I am going with the Washburns (no relation to the Gold Medal people, I don't think) to see another museum with an exhibit about Minnesota and the Civil War and of course I will give you a full report.

In the meantime, the snow has stopped here and the sun is trying to at least brighten up the sky a bit.  I hope that wherever you are is showing similar signs of effort by Mother Nature to kick spring into gear.

Catching Up

It's been a fun week since we last talked.  Actually, more like eight days, but who's counting?  I've been visiting friends and family more than touring, and as you've figured out I don't do a lot of blogging about my visiting activities - because, and I hate to say it so bluntly, my visiting activities are none of your business, really, and I'm saving all the good stuff for the novel* - but I've seen some cool places as well.

There are so many times when I am driving that I wish I had a magic camera which would automatically record what I am seeing, since it is often not possible to stop to take a picture.  The morning I left North Carolina was such a time.  It was foggy, and the gray softness skirting the eastern edge of the Smokies was so beautiful it took my breath away.  Driving on my Least Favorite Interstate, I-40, also took my breath away but not so much from the scenery.  Don't get me wrong, it's a gorgeous drive through the mountains, but the presence of massive numbers of semi's inspired fear more than awe much of the time.  Still, I made it through without incident and crossed into Tennessee.

Here's the view from the Highway 25E scenic overlook on the way down from the Smokies.

The valley is Bean Station, one of Tennessee's earliest white settlements.  It was founded by William Bean who built Bean Fort and, in front of that, the Bean Station Tavern, which was the largest tavern between Washington DC and New Orleans.  It must have been quite a tavern and hosted several presidents.

That picture gives you an idea of how beautiful it is in Tazewell, the small town in Northeast Tennessee where some of my in-laws live.  It's just south of the Kentucky line, and we drove to Cumberland Gap which is only a few minutes away.

There's an Iron Forge in Cumberland Gap which is a large stone furnace built for the use of people coming through the Gap who needed tools of various types.  Now it's a great trailhead from which my sister-in-law and niece and I took a short hike.

As on the other side of the Smokies, the recent spring snow had melted quickly and turned often dry creekbeds into rushing streams.  Very pretty, although for reasons I no longer remember, I don't seem to have any pictures of them.  Sorry about that!

So I worked my way north, stopping in Louisville, Noblesville, Fort Wayne, and Berrien Springs, to see various friends and family, and then drove through Chicago and Wisconsin on my way to the Twin Cities to see more friends and family.  (Aside:  is there a more spiritually desolate place on earth than Illinois between Chicago and the Wisconsin line?  At least West Texas had weird earth formations and a soul.  There's something about post-suburban Chicago that makes a person - or at least me - want nothing more than to keep going.)

On the way back next week, I'm going to stop in Wisconsin for a couple of days to check out Madison and who knows what else.  I did see a couple of interesting things that I want to explore, including some giant and seemingly random rock formations in Wisconsin.  If anyone knows anything about these, please comment.

Some of you may know that Indiana Highway 9 near Huntington is called Highway of the Vice Presidents.  This has always struck me as sort of pathetic.  It just seems like you're aspiring toward, I don't know, second place.  That's not a very nice thought, and it is somewhat colored by my disrespect for a particular former Vice President from Huntington, but I have a lot of thoughts that are not very nice so there you go.

Anyway, I thought about the Highway of the Vice Presidents as I saw a billboard for Menomonie, Wisconsin.  The billboard proudly proclaims that Menomonie is the 15th Best Small Town in America.  Does anyone else think that Sinclair Lewis would have had a field day with that slogan?  I guess I would have suggested something more along the lines of "Menomonie - one of America's best small towns" but hey, that's just me and I'm nobody's publicist.  Sometimes I see this sort of thing and I can't get it out of my head.

Not coincidentally, I suppose, I've been listening to a CD of Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary, which is about his time in Puerto Rico in the late 1950's.  That man could write, particularly before the booze and the drugs destroyed his ability to be coherent, and I feel nearly inspired.  To write, that is, not the booze and the drugs part (don't worry, Mom).  Thompson writes stuff that I wish I had written, such as:  "It was the tension between those two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going."  His descriptions of people and places tend to focus on the dark side and perhaps that's what makes them illustrative, interesting and spot on.

But enough hero worship.  The early morning precipitation in Minneapolis seems to have dissipated and I am going to check out a few places before my friend, Barb, and her husband come home from work.  I hate to waste a day, usually, plus if I stay here I'll eat all of the large unlocked Tupperware container of Chex mix which she left, rather foolishly I thought, in plain sight.


*This may or may not turn out to be a complete lie.

Gone to Carolina, Part IV

"Off-season" at Biltmore means the tickets are cheaper, the gardens are bare but not barren, and your dining options are limited but still ample.  "Off-season" in Bryson City, North Carolina, at the southern end of Smoky Mountains National Park, means that there's just not a heck of a lot to do.

I'm not really complaining.  Mostly I am on the way to see family in eastern Tennessee and the way you get there from Asheville is, luckily enough, through the Smokies.  I had anticipated spending a couple of days based in Gatlinburg, on the Tennessee side, if for no other reason than to get a head start Friday morning when I head north.  But the snow on Wednesday made me nervous about driving through the mountains so I figured I could still get a taste of the Smokies in Winter from the east side.  And I think I have.

For instance:

Deep Creek Trail

And this:

Toms Branch Falls



And this:

Indian Creek Falls

Beautiful no matter what the time of year!  I've been to the Smokies in July, and obviously the beauty in early March is more, um, subtle, but it's not hot and there are no crowds.

Those pictures are from Wednesday, the day it snowed.  Apparently depending on where you were in the area, you got one to six inches of snow.  It was nearly all gone by the mid-afternoon and only a few roads were still wet.

Temperatures rose slightly on Thursday, into the high 40's, so the snow was mostly gone when I hiked around.  I got a kick out of this path because water was running down it (which you can kind of see in this picture) and it seemed to be the complete opposite of the Rio Grande.

Walking Path

Also on the south side of the park is a historic building:

Mingus Mill

This is an old turbine mill that was operational until the owner (not named Mingus, by the way) sold it to the Feds during the Depression.  In the summer they have demonstrations of it.

Ah, the summer.  When every place is open.  Dare to dream.

Okay, that's not entirely fair.  There are places open, just not every place.  For instance, I wanted to see the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina, on the Cherokee Indian Reservation, and a coldish day like Wednesday seemed like a good day to do so.  But it wasn't open - I found out later it was because of the weather that day and that normally it's open.

Cherokee is an odd kind of tourist trap: a combination of Smoky Mountain activities (motels, tubing trips) with more moccasin shops than you can shake a stick at. And if you want a carved stick, they can take care of that, too. Lots of Indian-themed stores which I frankly didn't have the energy to explore.  They just seemed too kitschy.

Fortunately the museum opened on Thursday so I was able to visit.  It's a beautiful museum - Harrah's, located down the road, is a sponsor, so it's not a hand-typed-notecard sort of place.  They do a really interesting job of intertwining Cherokee heritage - and by that I mean mythology and stories and art - with history - and by that I mean the Western view of history, with names and dates.

And if you've been around for 11,000 years, you've got a lot of stories to tell.  Unfortunately for most of the Cherokee, those stories ended in tragedy either along the Trail of Tears or at the end of it, in Oklahoma.  The Trail of Tears was the forced relocation of the Cherokee (along with four other tribes from the southeastern U.S.) in the 1830's.  (Interestingly, you can actually walk parts of the Trail of Tears which are scattered in several states.  The National Park Service has a handy guide here.)  The Creeks and the Seminoles lost roughly half of their population who died along the way.

Remember John Ross?  Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation?  Right, that John Ross.  We met him outside of Chattanooga, in Rossville, last month.  Anyway, his wife shared her only blanket with a sick child and ended up dying on the forced relocation.  She was one of an estimated 4,000 to 8,000 Cherokees who died during the relocation.

I've been to Oklahoma, and let's just say that its countryside isn't exactly lush.  It's flat.  There are no forests to speak of.  It's dry.  To move people who view nature as an integral part of their lives from someplace like the Appalachian Mountains to someplace like Oklahoma is beyond cruel.  And of course, there's the whole "leaving behind everything you have and traveling hundreds of miles without much in the way of food and shelter" thing.  But then again, I haven't yet found any history of U.S. Indian policy that makes me proud.

There was some irony to the Indian Removal, as it was called.  ("Removal" is a pretty neutral word, don't you think?  Other than the fact that it's used to describe actions taken against human beings, it all sounds very sanitary.)  Anyway, in 1814, the life of Old Hickory himself, Andrew Jackson, was saved at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend by a Cherokee named Junaluska.  I guess Jackson didn't seem to feel this was a favor to be returned to Cherokees in general, because it was under his Presidency that the forced relocations began.  Junaluska was quoted as saying that if he'd known what Jackson would later do, he wouldn't have saved his life.  I think that's fair.

So, you may ask, if all the Cherokee were relocated to Oklahoma, why is there a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina?  The short answer is, they weren't all relocated.  The longer answer is more interesting.

In 1817, a 12-year old white orphan named William Holland Thomas arrived in the area where he was eventually adopted by the Cherokee Chief Yonaguska.  As a child, Thomas worked in a trading post and became fluent in Cherokee.  As an adult in the 1830's, he served as attorney and advisor for the Oconaluftee Cherokees and helped keep them from being relocated.  After the Civil War (in which he fought for the Confederates and led a unit of Cherokees; they were attacked near Bryson City according to the historic marker I saw) he was able to purchase land that eventually became the Eastern Band reservation which exists in Cherokee today.  (Interestingly, while Wikipedia calls him a chief, the museum calls him an "unofficial chief."  I guess I'll go with the museum on this one.)

There's a lot more history described in the museum, including a trip that several Cherokee leaders took to England in 1762.  If you're ever in the Smokies, drive over to the museum and take a look around.

Cherokee is a beautiful language to look at.  The street signs in the town are in both English and Cherokee, and there was even a billboard in Cherokee.  Here's what the language looks like.  Of course, I have no idea what this says.  I'm just putting it here so you can see it:

Credit:  http://ani-kutani.com/13moons/13-moons-page1a.jpg

Most of the time when you drive through an Indian reservation you don't see much.  At least, that's my experience in the west.  The reservations are pretty rural and the main roads generally don't go by towns - lately, of course, they tend to go by casinos, but that's a recent development.  So I was fascinated by Cherokee and I'm glad the snow kept me on the eastern side of the Smokies for another couple of days.

Tomorrow, north to Tennessee and then Kentucky and then Indiana to see some family.  Catch you in a few days!

Gone to Carolina, Part III

Sometime you just need a good snipe hunt.  Yesterday in Asheville, what with the rain and all, was such a sometime.

I'll admit that my primary curiosity about the Southern Appalachian Radio Museum was why it existed in the first place.  Asheville is not known for its electronics industry, after all.  I'd seen the museum listed on Trip Advisor and the fact that there were no reviews of it should have been, as they say, a clue.  But it's not like I was going to go hiking in the rain or anything so I set out to find it, armed with my trusty Droid and pretty good 4G cell coverage.

The museum is housed inside the Asheville community college campus, which made finding it somewhat challenging.  Luckily I knew from Trip Advisor that it was in the Elm Building and a friendly security guard let me park nearby.  Arriving at the Elm Building, I stuck my head in the first occupied office and asked where the museum was.  One lady had no idea they even had a museum but her officemate did, and directed me to the third floor.  On the third floor, I looked around a little and found a nice electronics techie guy who took time out from helping a student to show me where the museum was, down a hallway without benefit of signage.

It's only open Fridays from 1 - 3 p.m.  The window is as close as I got.

As you can see they've got a bunch of old radios, and this is Southern Appalachia, so the museum is well-named.  I've subsequently checked their website and it does clearly state their hours of operation.  Still, I don't have a definitive answer to my "why" question.  It may be as simple as somebody had a bunch of old radios and his wife (I'm comfortable profiling here) told him he had to get them out of the guest room.  Having a museum lets him keep collecting without marital conflict.  That's sort of the origin of the Wizard of Oz Museum (although in that case I don't know about marital conflict or, if so, whether a wife was involved).

But I was not terribly disappointed that I couldn't see the museum.  Sometimes the hunt itself is really all that matters.

The radio museum now beats out the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery and the Irish Cultural Museum of New Orleans for shortest hours of operation of any museum I've encountered.  I wasn't able to see those, either.

Too bad about the Fitzgerald museum in particular, because then I could have compared it with the Thomas Wolfe Memorial.  In downtown Asheville, their visitor center is next door to an old 6,000 square feet boarding house where author Thomas Wolfe grew up.  Called "Old Kentucky Home" (the owner prior to Wolfe's mother was a retired Kentucky minister), Wolfe lived there from 1906 until he left Asheville for college in 1916.  It is the inspiration for his classic novel Look Homeward, Angel.  I like early twentieth century American writers but will confess I've never read Wolfe.  His stuff always seemed pretty depressing; since his childhood was, in the words of our docent, Jim, "dreadful," I guess he came by it honestly.  Wolfe's father was a violent depressive with an unfortunate tendency toward drunkeness.  Wolfe lived in the boarding house with his mother, a driven and largely successful businesswoman and real estate speculator who purchased the boarding house as a way to generate cash for her real estate investments, but who wasn't much of a mother to her youngest son.  (Wolfe was born in 1900 and was the youngest of eight children.)

Here's a picture, mostly just to break up all of this text.

The coconut is from one of the trips that Wolfe took with his mother to Florida.  Despite being pretty unattentive (regular meals, for instance), she did instill in him a love for travel.

The subtitle to Look Homeward, Angel is "A Story of the Buried Life" which I like a lot.  Everybody has a buried life, I think.

Anyway, when the novel was published in 1929, Wolfe became most unpopular in Asheville (called "Altamont" in the book, and the boarding house was called "Dixieland").  Jim said that there were even death threats - Wolfe apparently made it clear that part of his purpose in writing was to settle some old scores and I guess he did that.  (He went on to write quite a bit more before his death just three weeks shy of his 38th birthday in 1938.)

The tour was a really interesting way not only to learn about Wolfe but also about Asheville and boarding houses.  For instance, both Wolfe and his older brother, Ben, contracted tuberculosis (which eventually killed each of them), presumably from boarders.  Many people with TB came to the mountains in those days, and it was illegal for them to live in regular rooming houses due to public health concerns.  Still, there were a lot of TB patients and Julia Wolfe (along with many other boarding house owners) was not going to turn away their cash, so a number of people with TB lived at Old Kentucky Home.

Tourism in the region is nothing new, and Jim said that since the forests were logged out at the turn of the last century, it's been the primary industry in the area.  (Asheville's beauty, of course, is what brought George Vanderbilt here.)

Originally I'd planned to pass on the Wolfe Memorial, but I'm glad I found it.  Sometimes these snipe hunts turn productive.  In fact, I'd say that they usually do.

Planning your trip around weather can be as successful as trying to time the stock market, but I've done pretty well in Asheville so far.  I went to Biltmore on the nicest day (sunny and 50's - not too shabby for early March).  And I chose another sunny (although colder) day for driving the Blue Ridge Parkway.  This is a 469-mile road that runs from Roanoke, Virginia, to the Smoky Mountains National Park.  When it's all open, that is - right now you can't get north of the east side of Asheville or south of the west side due to construction.  But that's okay, it's still a nice drive around town and you can get to the Folk Art Center which is another must-see if you're in the area.  It's a lovely museum with a wide variety of beautiful pieces - pottery, textile, wood, and so on - plus there's a nice gift shop.

Something about Asheville that I neglected to say in earlier posts, is that because of its relative poverty for most of the 20th century, a large part of its downtown is relatively intact, leading to the existence of buildings like this:

And, of course, it IS North Carolina, so one shouldn't be surprised by the use of basketballs in public art.  Cute, huh?

Weather permitting, later this morning I am headed to or through the Smokies for a couple of days, then up to eastern Tennessee to see family.  If the roads are good, I'll go to Gatlinburg and if they aren't, I'll stay on the North Carolina side of the mountains until the end of the week.  What I'm saying is that there may be a Going to Carolina Part IV in our blogging future.  Stay tuned.

Gone to Carolina, Part II

Everybody says that you should go to Asheville.  I'm now part of everybody, I guess.  (Fascinating aside:  a person recently told me that you shouldn't actually reside in Asheville; she said that the area has such "transitional energy" that everyone she knows who lives there has gone through major negative life changes while in the area.  I cannot provide data on that one, but she cited several examples.)

Asheville is the largest city in western North Carolina, with about 84,000 people but in a metro area that is over 400,000.  It seems like a city of about 200,000, if that gives you any sense of it.  In any event, it's big enough that there is a lot of diversity in how the community looks and feels.  There is a huge arts community.  The River Arts District, for instance, is a bunch of old industrial buildings that are being used as creative and gallery space by a wide variety of artists.

One such place is a glass studio where you can take a 30-minute mini-workshop on glass blowing.  This is what I made:

Isn't it fabulous?  I call it "Glass Cup."  It was very fun and luckily John, my teacher, was patient and helpful.  Here are the artists at work:

I've had some odd "small world" events lately - like when I randomly started talking with a woman at Fort Sumter whose husband taught at my high school in Omaha - but the weirdest one so far has to do with John, my glass mentor.

After I finished my masterpiece I put on my Fort Wayne International Airport bomber jacket.  John noticed Fort Wayne and we started talking.  Long story short, he is good friends with Russ Jehl's sister, Renee.  This is the same Russ Jehl who succeeded me - that's a nicer way of saying beat me, but it's the same thing - on City Council.  Now THAT is just too strange.  So I e-mailed Russ and he confirmed that, indeed, his mother does have a glass statue that John made.  Just goes to show that you need to be nice to everyone because you never know when your hands will be a foot away from glass hotter than molten lava and you'll be relying on the kindness of the friend of a friend for protection.

In addition to art (and the related concepts of a cute downtown, vegetarian restaurants and coffee shops that emphasize fair trade coffee), Asheville has a lot of regular looking places.  I'd even go so far as to call them unattractive.  Just older suburban type development - nothing special at all.  This actually made me like the city more, because it feels more real and less like a theme park.

Asheville is also home to Biltmore.  That is just "Biltmore," without the need for a "the" in front of it.  Simple.  Elegant.  Some of you less serfistercated people might know it as the Biltmore Estate.  This is the 250-room home of George Vanderbilt, built in the 1890's, and currently the largest private home in these United States.  To say it is amazing is to err in understatement.  My father might say "unbelieveable" but he would also add a two-syllable word between "unbe" and "lieveable."  And even that would be too modest in its description.

Any home where you drive three miles past the entrance to get to the house, and the entrance looks like this - well, you get my point.

Luckily you can't take pictures in the house.  I say "luckily" because I'd have spent weeks in there trying to get just the right shot and would have been ultimately unsuccessful anyway.  I don't think photography can capture it.  There's a Banquet Hall (capitalizations are intentional) that is seven stories tall.  Seven stories.  Tall.  For dinner.  The room is built of stone and draped with authentic Flemish tapestries from the mid-1500's and has honest-to-God thrones.  It has fireplaces where the hearth is taller than I am.  And oh yeah, a pipe organ the size you'd find in a cathedral.  No kidding.

The servants' quarters are larger and have better views (of the Smoky Mountains) than the early homes of Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson.  And lots of other people.  Most other people on earth, I'd dare to say. 

There's a Library (Vanderbilt was an avid reader) with 10,000 books - which is only about half of his collection.  The 43 bathrooms were remarkable for the day when most people didn't have running water, and although they were very modern they did not contain sinks because why would you want a sink when a servant would bring you a nice bowl of warm water with which to wash? 

There's an indoor swimming pool and a bowling alley and a gymnasium.  There's mechanical refrigeration (again, very modern for 1895). 

The home sits on 8,000 acres.  Of course, that's smaller than it was in 1895.  Vanderbilt was among the earliest practioners of forestry and owned all of the mountains that you can see from the property.  Did you read that correctly?  I said "all of the mountains that you can see."  That's three layers deep of mountains.  When George returned from their honeymoon with his wife, Edith, who had never seen the property, she was greeted by bonfires that had been lit at the top of each peak.  (After his death, Edith sold the mountains, about a half million acres, to the Federal government at a reduced price with the requirement that the land be conserved.  Today it is the Pisgah National Forest.) 

Here is what their Greenhouse looks like (it was too big for me to get it all in the picture):

"Over the top" doesn't even begin to describe the place.

For understandable marketing reasons, their website doesn't have a lot of pictures so I can't direct you there to see it.  They want you to fork over some pretty hefty coin for the tour (it's $45 per person off season) and if you could see it all on-line, you might be tempted to avoid the time and expense of going in person.  Don't.  It's worth the trip.  You can make a day of it:  there's walking paths and water and a small museum and a winery with free wine tasting; you can rent bikes and boats, among other activities.  Here's the Bass Pond from a couple of angles.

Their winery ("the most visited winery" in the U.S., or on earth, or somewhere) used to be the dairy for the estate.  Of course I wholeheartedly support this important and visionary reuse.

I'm not going to give you the history of the place, other than several points which I found interesting:

• George Vanderbilt, the youngest son of William Vanderbilt (who took his father's $100 million and doubled it in the 1880's - take that, Warren Buffet), was a bachelor when he built the home in the 1890's.  He wanted a house that would be a retreat for himself, his siblings and their kids - and if it were bigger and better than those estates owned by his older brothers and sisters well, there's nothing wrong with that.
• George, Edith and Cornelia (their daughter and only child) were in Europe in 1911 and had planned to return to America on the maiden voyage of the Titanic.  At the last minute they changed their mind and took an earlier ship, the Olympic.  Whether their change of heart was due to other family members being aboard the Olympic or trying to avoid an impending coal strike is unknown.  Regardless, in hindsight it was obviously a good decision.  Although Edith and Cornelia would probably have survived the wreck (first class women and children first, after all), only about a third of the first class men made it home.  Tragically, one of their staff stayed behind to finish packing and therefore was on the Titanic where he perished.
• Cornelia married John Cecil, a British diplomat, in 1924 and they ran the home for a decade.  In 1930 they opened the property to the public to help support the estate and also encourage tourism for the Asheville area, which was particularly hard hit by the Great Depression.  They divorced in 1934.  Interestingly, while Cornelia spent most of the rest of her life in England (she died in 1976), John remained at Biltmore and played "a significant role in management of the estate" until his death in the 1950's, according to the museum there.  The property is still owned and managed by the family - with the help of about 1,800 employees, each of whom is friendlier than the last.  Really - they take hospitality seriously at Biltmore.

Here are a couple of tips I'll give you - at no additional charge - about visiting:

1. If you're not a huge garden person, you can save a bunch of money by going off season (January 2 until mid-March).  Plus I'm sure the crowds are more manageable.  But if you're big into gardens, wait until late spring or early summer and just recognize that you'll pay more and most likely deal with more visitors.
2. Unless your kids are incredibly well behaved and patient and don't get tired (i.e., they're not really kids), I'd say come without them.  Don't get me wrong - I like kids and the ones I saw at Biltmore were all very nice.  It's just that if you're going to get your money's worth you'll want to see nearly everything, and an hour and a half in wandering through a big house, where you can't touch anything, is a lot to ask of a kid.  I heard one lady say to another that she hadn't been able to see a lot on her earlier trip, "because my kids couldn't tolerate it."  Of course, you could always bring a spare adult who could watch the kids run around outside while you tour the house, and then trade off.  You're not getting near the house, however, without a ticket, so your babysitter needs one, too.  The Cecil/Vanderbilts are no fools.

Today it's been raining in Asheville, but I don't mind because I found a wonderful little coffee shop with yummy muffins and working wi-fi.  Still, I miss the Firefly.  Some days, there's no place like home.