Summer Road Trip: Day 36 day trip to Asheville and "The Biltmore"

Alarms woke us up early so we cold get over to the Biltmore Estate. It was an hour drive over there and raining once again. Since it has been raining a lot Michelle put out a small cup to see how much it would fill up (the picture of that will be up later). The Biltmore is a massive estate. It is the largest privately owned house in the U.S. To say it is huge would be an understatement. It is massive at 120+ rooms, 176,000 square feet, on 8000 acres of land. It is incredible. It was kind of pricey for the tour, but it was cool. We toured the gardens, the house, the winery area and also got rained on, again. In the house there are tapestry's from the 1500's, statues of the 12 apostles from the 1700's, many drawings, paintings, a 70,000 gallon indoor pool, a bowling alley with 2 lanes, 9 dressing rooms for the pool area just for women (the men were on the opposite side that we did not see), 42 bathrooms (most houses at that time had 0), a library with thousands of books, the hunting room, the smoking room, etc....... It can't really be explained without seeing it. The original estate had 125,000 acres, but was sold off to be part of the Pisgah National Forest. On the estate they had a blacksmith shop, a woodworking shop, stables, and is still a working winery and farm.
We took a lot of pictures outside, but not inside, because you are not allowed to do any type of photography inside the house. We toured the winery area and they had wine tastings and wine for sale. We bought a bottle and will try it one of these nights.

We drove back to the Cabin for more rain. Michelle and I caught a couple of lightning bugs to show to the kids. They were cool. We just sat on the porch for a while as it rained off and on for the whole night. If it wasn't raining we were going to try going to a bonfire and fireworks show, but that did not happen.