All the news that fit to blog

Well blogosphere, I think enough time has passed and we're due for a new blog post. We've been up to a couple different things lately including an adventure to North Carolina to visit the largest home in the United States and a car buying adventure! We hope you have a few minutes to rest, relax, and enjoy this post.

Many of you probably remember that great 1994 classic film featuring Macaulay Culkin called Richie Rich and the rather spectacular shots of the huge fountain outside a magnificently huge house. I guess you can imagine where I'm going with this... yes, the house is real, it's called the Biltmore Estate, and it's located in Asheville, North Carolina. Don't stop reading to look it up on Wikipedia! Here's the cool stats for you: Built by George Washington Vanderbilt II (grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the great shipping magnate who founded Vanderbilt University) between 1895-1891. It includes 250 rooms and 178,926 square feet! It is replete with the fountain in the entrance, but despite a thorough search, Mount Richmore could not be located. Needless to say, we were pretty excited to be there! The house has such an incredible history and awesome presence. With no expense spared, and only the finest craftsmen employed, the estate is a remarkable example of what would be done at the time with steel, stone, wood, and lots and lots of skill.

We took an audio-guided tour of the house which took about 2 hours to complete. We didn't see all of it, but we saw enough! Sadly, they don't allow pictures to be taken of the interior, so you'll just have to go and see it for yourself. Tickets aren't cheap (around $50), but it really is worth it. Going through the estate takes you back in time and keeps your mouth wide open in amazement of the scale and detail in each room. One example is a long room which was designed solely for the feature of 5 flemish tapestries from the 1530s. Each is about 15' square and took 10 years to make. Another favorite room was the library. It holds nearly half of Mr. Vanderbilt's 23,000-volume collection. The size of the room was set so that the 1720s painting by Giovanni Pellegrini called The Chariot of Aurora would fit perfectly on the ceiling.

Hand-carved stone and wood predominate inside and outside the house. All of which were detailed, ornate, interesting, and perfect.

So, I guess you could say it was on the impressive side of things. :)

Less impressive, are our two cars. They provide basic transportation, which is exactly all we've needed for the last few years. But as many of you know, we've been searching for a new car for the last year or so. As many of you also know, we definitely tend to think a lot before making decisions, especially ones with such a large financial impact. Lord help us when it comes to buying our first house!! We had been focusing, mostly, on the Chevy Camaro up until a couple months ago. We decided we should probably go test drive a Mustang and give it a fair shot, although we were lusting mostly after the sharp looks of the Chevy at the time. Surprisingly,we really enjoyed the Mustang and started to look into the available options, pricing, etc. As time went on and after a somewhat disappointing test drive of a Camaro, we settled on a Mustang and a particular set of features. Unfortunately, this combination proved to be quite rare and we could only locate a small handful of these cars in the country. The closest was in Wisconsin and it turned out to be quite a bit cheaper if we could go get it, rather than having a local dealer have it shipped here. So bright and early yesterday morning, I got on a plane to Milwaukee to go pick up our new car. After driving the car and looking it over (drooling), I signed on the dotted line and drove away! About 12 hours later, I pulled into our driveway to seal the deal on a long, but very exciting day. Most if not all of you have already seen a picture of the car, but here are a couple more just in case.

We're looking forward to enjoying this car for many years to come!

Anybody in the market for a 1998 Toyota Corolla? :)

Until next time...

Burgess Falls and the American Museum of Science and Energy

Well hello blogosphere! It's time for another episode of "what have Tim and Heather been up to lately"! Probably our favorite things to write about are our little weekend trips around the area. Last time we wrote about a nice trip to Pensacola, FL for our 5th anniversary. One of the most popular posts we've written so far covered a trip to the Jack Daniel's Distillery in nearby Lynchburg, TN. This weekend, we decided to spend our Saturday exploring to the east of Nashville. Our main target was Oak Ridge, TN which was home to the development of enriched Uranium during the Manhattan Project in the 1940's. With Heather's interest in women's history and my interest in military history, it was sure to be a hit! We also decided to take a quick detour on our way to Oak Ridge to check out Burgess State Park. Overall it was a very fun day and should make a good blog post! With that, I hope you enjoy reading about and seeing pictures of our fun little weekend. As usual, it's a pretty long post.  :)


We started off this road trip like we start every road trip... with an egg McMuffin. 'Cause lets be real, there's hardly anything more delicious and convenient for the start of a road trip than that! The weather was pristine, traffic was light, our stomachs were full, and the day was ours to enjoy! We took I-40 East for about 60 miles and turned south in Cookeville. After just another 15 miles through the sticks, we made it to Burgess Falls State Park. As you can imagine, the main attraction is a series of waterfalls on a small river.

We were greeted at the beginning of the walk by this sign which cautioned of a "strenuous hike".

Fortunately, the hike wasn't too bad. The part of the trail that was actually considered strenuous was a series of switchbacks at the end of the trail that we avoided. One of the best parts of the walk was that the waterfalls (a series of 3) got progressively bigger as we went along. It would have been such a bummer to go the other way!

Ok Ok, so a pristine glacial run-off it's not. But hey, we gotta take what we can get here in Tennessee!

The map had the audacity to list the "bridge" in the picture below as a shortcut to the end of the trail. How about NO...

The trail was riddled with tortuous roots like the ones here. At this point we were thinking that maybe by "strenuous" they meant "easy to dodge and pretty to photograph roots on trail"

Making the trail fairly muddy at times were these small but beautiful trickling streams.

After a 20-minute hike, we made it to "middle falls". As I'm sure all of you know, one of the most wonderful things about a waterfall is the sound. It's so incredible to see tremendous volumes of water pouring over a ledge with massive energy, and the whooshing sound that accompanies it just adds so much to the powerful presence of the scene.

Obviously this video doesn't do either the video or the audio experience any justice, but it's the best we can do!

After enjoying that view for a few minutes, we continued on towards the "big falls". Fortunately, the name was appropriate and we got quite a view!

My favorite part about this waterfall was the mist that shot out at the bottom. It made a nice rainbow that I hope you can see in the video. It's probably best to watch this on full screen!

We walked back to our car and drove further east to Oak Ridge. It's a fascinating city that came about in 1942 as a part of the Manhattan Project which was the name for the Federal operation to develop the atomic bomb. I can't give you a history lesson that is any better than what is on Wikipedia, so I'll just link to that page for those of you that are interested.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Ridge,_Tennessee

For those who ain't got time for that, the city was established as the location for the refinement of Uranium-238 (a stable, non-radioactive element) into Uranium-235, a very rare, very radioactive isotope that we hoped would allow for nuclear fission. Only about 0.7% of the Uranium on earth is of the 235 isotope variety. Refinement was expensive and required tons of man-power. Sorry, man and woman-power. In fact, the city which started out as little more than some scattered farms was transformed into a super-secret city of over 75,000 people in 3 years. The Uranium that was enriched here went on to be used in the "Little Boy" bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. Impressively, less than a kilogram of Uranium-235 underwent fission which resulted in an explosion with an equivalent yield of 32,000,000 pounds of TNT.

So it is in the wake of the incredible history of this city that the American Museum of Science and Energy exists. Not surprisingly then, a substantial portion of the museum is dedicated to telling the story of Oak Ridge in the 1940's.

A large portion of the museum was pictures and text. Aka, not the best blog material. Sorry.

But there were quite a few cool artifacts like this book of coffee ration tickets!

Heather is at the controls of a calutron. It was a device that used magnetic fields to separate the different Uranium isotopes.

Here's a picture of several calutrons being monitored. In total, there were over 1,100 of these machines in Oak Ridge. Amazingly, these women were recruited and trained for this job without being told what they were doing. They were just instructed to monitor the gauges and make sure the dial stayed between fixed values. If something went wrong, they could make adjustments. It wasn't until after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan that many workers realized what exactly they had been working on.

This was both Heather's and my favorite picture taken by photographer Ed Westcott.

They had one of the actual houses on display! This example is 24' square and is a 2-bed 1-bath arrangement. Over 1,600 of this particular model were built at a cost of $3,500 each.

After learning everything we could about the city of Oak Ridge, it was time to go upstairs for some quality science shenanigans!

After we finished at the museum, we grabbed a bite at the most incredible pizza place, called Big Ed's Pizza. Seriously, we've been thinking about that place all day! If you're ever on I-40 between Nashville and Knoxville, it's definitely worth your while to head into Oak Ridge for a pizza.

And that concluded our Saturday! We've been inspired by our friend Bob who made a bucket list of things to do in Nashville before he moves to California this Spring. We've made our own list and will surely be including some of these things here as we cross them off our own list. The weather was a perfect 65 degrees today without a cloud in the sky. After surviving a few doses of polar vortices, I think we can speak for most people when we say we're truly looking forward to Spring. Draco is going to have surgery on Wednesday to hopefully remove a pretty big growth on his side. Be looking for a post about him in the coming weeks!

With that, we hope you enjoyed reading our stories and that this blog finds you well as always. Until next time...