Jim bought tickets yesterday at the RV park for us to visit the Biltmore Estate. This house was built by George W. Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1895. It is the largest privately owned house in the U.S. and the fourth largest in the world. It has 250 rooms and sits on 8,000 of the estate's original 125,000 acres. It is full of fabulous art, tapestries, furniture, sculpture, and antiques. Jim said his liberal economics professor at UT Austin would have called it "sickeningly opulent". We got there about 10 am this morning and left at 5 pm. We took the tour of the house using audio head sets. The audio detailed the rooms you were looking at while in the house. No pictures were allowed inside the house. After going through about 60 of the rooms we had some lunch at the Stable restaurant. This restaurant is in the old stables next to the house. The stable also houses some shops. There are a few different places to eat on the estate and they have everything from pizza to really fancy dinners. The estate has its own beer and a winery. We had a beer with lunch and later we did a wine tasting and bought two bottles. The employees were busy getting the house ready for Christmas and it was beginning to look really pretty.
After lunch we took a walk through the grounds and gardens which were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who also designed New York's Central Park and Boston Common. We left the estate and went to Hendersonville to a brewery named South Allegeny Brewing and had a beer. When we returned to the Casita we got our clothes together and went to wash them. We had 4 loads.
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