Let me tell you what we saw on our last road trip

A couple of weeks ago, Linda and I took a trip down to Augusta, Ga., to visit her brother and his wife and family. It was her brother's (Tom and Gail Lemon) 50th wedding anniversary, so we got to see extended family and friends from the area.

Tom's grown sons and their wives did all the work for the family dinner, which included smoked pulled pork and various side dishes. It was an excellent meal and we enjoyed meeting a bunch of Tom's and Gail's friends. We were both struck with the sourness of the barbecue sauce as it was a little outside of our experience, although it wasn't unpleasant at all. In fact, we were exposed to different flavors of barbecue sauce while in Georgia, and all of them seemed to be somewhat on the sour side.

After spending a few days in Augusta, we headed north to Ashville, North Carolina, to see the Biltmore Estate. This estate is the largest privately-owned house in America, coming in at almost 179,000 square feet in total. While in Ashville, we stayed at the Grove Park Inn, which has some historic value since a number of presidents and other prominent citizens have stopped in there over the years. It is a large, multistoried building resting on the top of a rather tall hill overlooking the city.

One fact which I could appreciate about it is that all the furniture in the inn was built in the Arts and Crafts style of the late 19th- early 20th century tradition and was actually made during that period.

Grove Park Inn is a luxury resort, so the rooms can be a little pricey. You can pay close to $1,000 a night if you so choose, but our room was considerably less than that. They do tack on another $150 to the price of your room for incidentals. I made sure that we understood what incidentals were and that we didn't use many of them. I may be a rube, but I try not to be a dumb one. They do have valet parking for $25 or you can park your own car for only $15. We parked our own car. (FYI: If you leave the inn to go into town in your vehicle, it will be another $15 upon your return.)

That evening, we drove into town and dined at Mel's Café, a place I had found online. Mel is a black man who knows how to fry chicken and okra and boil black-eyed peas. The meal was great except for the fact that the cornbread had sugar in it. That's a big "no, no" in my book. But Mel was friendly and the atmosphere was unique. I wouldn't hesitate to eat there again. Linda had what I call a wasted opportunity -- some sort of a wrap. She said it tasted good.

Breakfast at the inn starts at $26 per person but, since we were planning to check out before breakfast the next morning, we decided to eat at a little place called Biscuit Head, another online find. I highly recommend this café because it has everything I look for in a local restaurant. The breakfasts are large, tasty, mostly locally-sourced ingredients and varied so a person can find most any kind of sausage or pancake he desires. The clientele were just as varied as the menu. All in all, it was a very captivating place to eat breakfast. And the coffee was great!

After breakfast we drove out to Biltmore Estate, which is surrounded by more than 8,000 acres of land still owned by the Vanderbilt family. The house is incredibly large with more than 250 rooms and 135,000 square feet of living space. Most of the rooms are close to 30 feet tall. The house has 33 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms, three kitchens and 65 fireplaces.

No one lives in the house now that it has become a major tourist attraction. George Washington Vanderbilt, II, built the house in six years (1889-1895), but not without a lot of help. A special railroad track was built to haul the workmen out to the job site every day. Even the foundation wall for the basement is more than 6-feet thick, so the massive amounts of labor are everywhere in evidence. The landscaping is larger than life but fits the size of the house. There is a large greenhouse off to one side with steps leading down to it from the dwelling.

Mr. Vanderbilt was a book collector who bought first edition books from all over the world. His collection eventually grew to more than 22,000 volumes, most of which are still in the house. The tour is self-guided and takes you through 45 of the most interesting rooms in the house. The largest kitchen is in the basement, together with the laundry and the servants living quarters. When we passed through the laundry, I thought it still smelled like detergent.

Looking out the back window on any floor, one sees the land drop off almost precipitously so that it makes the house appear to be sitting in the air. If there is a fog round about the dwelling, the house appears to be floating in the clouds. It is spectacular, to say the least.

As you wander through the magnificent rooms, you can see manikins dressed in period clothing with movie posters beside them showing how the characters in the movie were dressed in exactly the same designs. It seems that a number of films have been made using the house as either a backdrop or dwelling.

In the entry, there is a rather large sunken garden with glass walls. This room, known as the Winter Garden, is full of all kinds of plants and, like all the other rooms in the house, shows the kind of excess which caused that period of time in the nation's history to come to be called the "Gilded Age." This was a time when the robber barons were making money faster than they could spend it and were spending it mostly on themselves.

If you are at all interested in learning more about that time, Mark Twain has written an interesting little novel about it called, "The Gilded Age." I don't know why he named it that, but he did and you can read it for yourself.

After finishing our tour, Linda and I headed north again -- this time to Charlottesville, Virginia, to visit Monticello, the home of our third president and one of the greatest men in American history, the inimitable Thomas Jefferson. More on that next week.

Sam Byrnes is a Gentry-area resident and weekly contributor to the Eagle Observer. He may be contacted by email at [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author.

Editorial on 03/08/2017