Asheville, Day 3 - Part 1

Finally Thursday arrived, the day I'd really been waiting for!  The whole trip was great, honestly, for so many reasons.  But in my book it's always tough to beat Chihuly.  There is just something about it.  The colors.  The artistry.  The shapes.  The settings.  Everything he does is done so well, and it makes my closet artist (the one who loves art but sucks at it in real life) burst at the seams.  It's just so beautiful, every time.  And to put it in a place like Biltmore that's already so beautiful?  Well...that was just over the top!  Hence about 400 photos that day among over 500 for the whole trip!  Cutting them down for posting here was very hard, but it looks like you'll get three posts from that one day so I can include all of the ones I like best!

Ironically, the first picture isn't my own.  My uncle took it of my mom and me in front of the first piece we saw...

Photo credit: Uncle Arsene

Doesn't get much more regal than that.  It was stunning in the sunlight.  I'm so used to seeing pieces indoors, even if they're lit for an exhibit, and I had no idea how the sun would enhance it.  Even the outdoor pieces I saw in Pittsburgh were under cloudy skies, so the gorgeous weather on this day was an unexpected bonus. 

Look how shiny it is!

Seriously...so pretty.

The mansion was truly impressive.  It's so huge and ornate.  Normally just the house would be enough of a draw, but clearly we had bigger fish to fry that day and this would be a nice accompaniment.

I have no idea why they'd have chosen to build there...none at all ;-)

We headed down to the Italian Garden, and it was a sight to behold.  Not just the glass, but the flora and fauna were great as well!  Check out this fish!

And the water lilies in the fountains were stunning.  You'll start to notice a theme here.

The float boat was so gorgeous in the sun.  The colors were so vivid!

Even the standalone floats were so pretty.  In with the water lilies, it was perfect.

Every set of lily pads had a different colored flower, and those were stunning in their own right!

How about these lily pads (or what we assume were just a different variety).  It almost makes you want to put something on there, like it's a tray. (Or maybe I envisioned something landing on them and them snapping shut to eat it...cool either way.)

Who knew something totally in white could be so eye-catching?

I've seen reeds like this at almost every exhibit I've seen, but the way they're used always makes them end up more interesting than you'd think for a bunch of straight pieces.  And yes, those green ones in front were amazing because of their metallics.  We all agreed they looked a bit like some large Christmas tree ornaments, but obviously way better!

The fiori boat was stunning.  I really need to zoom in on the many angles of all the photos to appreciate all of the different shapes.

Look at those colors!

And one more for good measure...

Off to the Pergola we went, and the view down there was stunning.

Many of the fiori looked like the shapes above, but these were really cool with their stripes.

These lime green and black ones were almost serpent-like.

These blue ones have little finger-like extensions on top, almost like a little splash.

Back at the house, we saw another display outside the front windows.

Just inside the gorgeous front doors was another display, this one in the Winter Garden.  There were so many pieces to look at here.

One of my favorite things was that all of the white pieces had little sea creatures on top.  Check out the shell and the little jellyfish (I think) in this one.

One of the most impressive rooms in the house was the main dining room.  From the pipe organ...

...to the table and tapestries...

...to the giant triple fireplace...

It was stunning.  As was every other room in the house.  The elaborate wood ceilings, the fancy furniture, and endless attention to detail...it was everywhere.  One of my favorite rooms was the library, with wall-to-wall books on two floors.  We almost missed it, but check out the pretty spiral staircase up to the second floor.

This multi-tier chandelier was so cool.

The two-lane bowling alley was cool, as was the old-school gym (wooden hand weights?!), but I wanted to share another cool spot, one that my dad said was his favorite part of the tour when he went on it earlier this year--the pool!

I could share countless photos from the house tour, but we'd never move on to the rest of the good stuff!  Suffice it to say that the Vanderbilts spent a lot of money on everything and appear to have been very well traveled.  It was gorgeous.

After a couple hours of walking, we headed out into the courtyard near the former stables and sat down for a snack just in time for the skies to open.  Luckily we were covered!  We seemed to have a lot of mid-afternoon rainstorms while we were there, but they never cramped our style!  It was a nice excuse for a little rest before some shopping (food samples and souvenirs...yay!) and then it was on to our next round of amazingness...

Asheville, Day 2

After a bit of a rough first night of sleep sharing a bed with my mom (never pass up the Z-Quil while traveling, folks), we slept in a bit before heading out for another busy day.  Our first stop was the Moose Café, which was appropriate given the sizable moose collection in my past.  They had some cute ones in the shop, so it was a good thing that I've sworn off buying more.  I might have needed a third airplane ticket!

The food was really good, particularly the giant biscuits...with white sausage gravy.  Soooo good, that southern cookin'.  After that we headed to the Blue Ridge Parkway for some time in the Appalachian Mountains.  Our first stop was the Folk Art Center, which was a sort of museum/gallery.  They had a small collection of their own, but most of the space was filled with art for sale and a large retail shop.  They had some really cool pieces (too bad I couldn't take pictures of them), but seeing some of the blown glass in that shop made me really look forward to bringing out my blown glass pumpkins soon!

Outside the Folk Art Center

We headed up into the mountains even though the clouds were looking pretty thick.  Even still, we did see some great views!

Our next stop, Craggy Gardens, was much more cloudy, but I did catch a shot of this little guy...

As we stood there, the clouds started to clear a bit.  You could just see peeks of sun on the mountains.  So pretty!

I love that one red flower!

We headed to Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi.  On the walk up to the lookout, I captured this cool shot...mushroom and centipede (?)...creepy but cool!  I guess it was day for connecting with nature's smallest creatures.

At the summit is the grave of Elisha Mitchell, who died trying to prove it was the highest peak in the east.  The lookout behind it was really pretty.  Note in this picture how it's cloudy beyond, but that you can see the trees next to it.

By the time we got up to the top, we were nearly enveloped in clouds!  Here's my mom and Aunt Sue.  Notice how the cloud is obscuring the view of them a bit, probably less than 10 feet away!

This is looking over the edge...and those are the trees that looked clear in that other picture.  It was amazing how quickly it came on, and how weird it felt to be in a cloud!

Selfie in a cloud...my hair was starting to get damp!

It was probably a good 20 degrees cooler there than it was at our last stop, too.  It was a bummer to miss the views, but how often do you get to hang out in a cloud?

The trees at the top had some weird stuff growing on them.  Some sort of lichen, perhaps?

On our drive back down we saw this cool waterfall.  Of course, it wasn't really this close...

It looked more like this...

See that white streak in the middle?

We could barely tell it was moving, but eventually I could zoom in and see it.  I can't help but wonder what it looks like now that the hurricane rains have passed through!

Back down at normal elevation, we headed into downtown Asheville.  Our first stop was the Wicked Weed Brewery.

We walked up the street to Mast General Store, which is one of those stores that has everything!  Hard to impress when you live relatively close to Vidler's in East Aurora, but it was a fun store nonetheless!

Downtown Asheville was cool.  Very funky, almost like a small town version of Portland with its earthy but oddly fun vibe.  We actually visited a store called The Loft on our last day there (it won't get its own post because it was short) that had more F-bombs on merchandise than any store I've ever seen, but it was hilarious.  They had every sort of gag-gifty, irreverent sort of item you could imagine, along with other cute stuff.  Socks, signs, coasters, jewelry, books, décor...all funny or funky.  It was the perfect fit for the city.  Definitely a cool city.

We headed home earlier than usual that day.  We took a stroll around the neighborhood and met a sweet neighbor and two of her kids.  One of the interesting parts of the trip was that we were running into hurricane evacuees and/or hearing stories from everyone else that they had a connection to someone who lived in the affected areas.  In this case, it was the neighbor's parents.  It really hit home in cases like that.  Watching the coverage almost felt like when Buffalo has a lake effect storm and we don't, where you feel guilty about having a beautiful day when they're going through hell.  It was an oddly familiar--but infinitely worse--feeling.

The neighborhood is a newer one, with only a little more than a dozen houses right now.  Their street is pretty much sold, but the street behind them (whose house fronts they see from their back) are slowly getting built and sold.  Soon there will be more further uphill.  My aunt and uncle's house is one floor, but the newer houses are interesting, most with split garages on the first floor and living spaces on the top two floors.  They almost look like two family houses, or like they belong at the beach with their second floor porch.  We walked through a partially completed one.  It was cute and different, but a little out of my price range upon further investigation!  We had a delicious homemade dinner that night of chicken and capers with rice and corn.  My Uncle Arsene is a great cook and even cleans up!  He loves having domain over his kitchen, and he's good at it.  I guess he discovered that love later in life, and it works out great for my aunt!

We took a break from hurricane coverage and spent the night playing cards.  There's a family game that we used to spend hours playing years back.  It's called Big Bertha, and it's similar to rummy.  While it frustrates the crap out of everyone at times, we had a blast playing.  It brings back so many memories of crazy games with a ton of us playing around our kitchen table or my grandma's kitchen table.  Back in the day there were a couple weeks most summers where my Uncle Ron and his two kids and my aunt and uncle and their two kids would all be in town.  It usually fell around our family reunion and ideally Canal Fest, and while it was a chaotic couple weeks at my grandma's house, we had a lot of fun with family outings and yes, card games.  We even had records (that are still on a small memo board that's been passed around since we cleaned out my grandma's house) and this game elicited many memories of past games.  We laughed about how my grandma used to complain about her hand and then act all surprised when she could suddenly be able to go "out".  That led to memories of how my late cousin Kristi would react when grandma pulled a move like that.  Another cousin used to rub her drawn cards on the table to "rub the spots off" and make it a wild card, and my aunt still does that, too!  When I mentioned that we could look at my parents' scanned pictures on my computer another night, that led into a hilarious recollection of their wedding night, which I had never heard the backstory on.  It was all such a fun walk down memory lane for all of us.

I think that was also the night I FaceTimed with the boys.  It was good catching up with them after a couple days away, and of course Carter was trying to get me to do some sort of imaginary play with him even though we were talking via a video screen.  Silly kid.

By this point the hurricane was really becoming a concern.  It still wasn't a weather thing for Asheville, but more how it was going to impact Charlotte.  We had hoped that this unpredictable hurricane would do something else unpredictable and go south, but no such luck.  We'd have to make a tough decision in the next day or so.  But the next day was a HUGE one...Chihuly day!  How big?  Nearly 400 pictures big.  So...multiple posts are in your future!