Asheville Adventures

A couple weekends ago Adam took me on a surprise getaway weekend to Asheville, NC. The best part of the getaway? No kids. :)

We kicked off our weekend with a Saturday morning breakfast at our favorite Asheville spot, Tupelo Honey Cafe.

One of my favorite things to get there are the sweet potato pancakes. We always order our own breakfast and then one pancake to split between the two of us. They are so thick that we still took half of it back to the hotel with us.

Adam was so thoughtful and knew I've always wanted to go to the Biltmore Estate so he got us two tickets to the Festival of Flowers there.

This was the entrance to the estate.

Our delicious lunch we ate out by the carriage house (now turned into a bunch of shops and cafe's).

We were only into the 2nd week of Festival of Flowers so all of the summer flowers weren't in bloom yet. But, as you can see the tulips were beautiful.

I think Ms. Scarlet killed Mr. Green with a knife in the conservatory. This is the conservatory. And I always think of playing CLUE when I hear the word conservatory.

Live music in the garden.

From our house to yours, Merry Christmas. The guy that took our picture said we should put this on our Christmas card.


Well, we didn't get the audio tour, but apparently that is the way to go if you have an exra 17 bucks that you don't want to spend on another hot dog. However, my little pamphlet was more than informative and it gave us still at least an hour and a half in the house exploring all 250,000 square feet of living area. There are 250 bedrooms and 43 bathrooms at a time when most households didn't even have one bathroom. It was built in 1889 by a 33 year old bachelor, George Vanderbilt, who coincidentally ended up marrying a year and a half later which reminds me of the famous line, "If you build it, they will come." The crazy thing was in he originally set out to build a 2,500 square foot lodge. How a couple extra zeros got in there, nobody knows. The house is literally 4 ACRES of living space. My legs were tired after the walk. Maybe George V. had segway to get around on. ;)

And thanks to Mom and Dad R. who watched the kids for us for 2 nights and 2 days! The longest I've ever been away from them! Next time, I might add on a couple more nights. :)