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...
