Last weekend the trip was a bit further. Some friends from South Carolina who I knew when I lived in Japan live in Greenville, SC which is a great little city. The downtown is spectacular with a park with waterfalls and everything. It's only about 2-3 hours to Greenville where we spent the night before heading up to Asheville which is about another hour away. That is the site of Biltmore Estate, once a Vanderbilt home. In the 1930's, the locals asked them to open it to the public to bring tourists to combat the failing economy. At one point it consisted of 10s of 1000s of acres but now is about 8000 acres with a winery, gardens and America's largest home. Over 250 rooms and 43 bathrooms. That is really impressive considering that it was built in 1895 when indoor plumbing at all was rare.
Since I don't feel like posting a ton of pictures all at once, below are pictures of The Little White House. After talking about Biltmore, it is hard not to notice how small it is although I guess I didn't get many pictures of the outside. The whole house was only about 25x80 per level although I think it had two floors and we only saw one. I thought the pics of the sentry outpost were also pretty cool. There were several of these outside the house where a guard would have been stationed.
