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.