Yesterday was our last day in Asheville. Before we left town, we checked one thing off of my bucket list; we toured the Biltmore mansion. The house is so awesome that any attempt by me to describe it would be a disservice.
We parked our vehicle in Lot C, which has a shuttle up to the mansion. The shuttle dropped us off not far from the door. There was a long line waiting outside. Groups enter in 15-minute increments. Our tickets were for 11:15, and we were a little early, so we had time to look through the gift shops before our tour.
The mansion was awesome, as I said earlier. The house, the largest in the U.S., is over 150,000 square feet of living space. It features a bowling alley and an indoor swimming pool. I cannot fathom the kind of wealth it took to build the place, or to live there. It was not a private residence for very long.
When we left the Biltmore, we hunted down a bbq joint called "Bear's Smokehouse." On Wednesday, an employee at another restaurant had told us that Bear's sells something called "Bear Balls." Who could resist those? We had to try them. Turns out, they're a mixture of cornbread, macaroni & cheese, and chopped pork barbeque, rolled into balls and deep fried. Think hushpuppies, only slightly larger, with meat and macaroni and cheese inside. They were amazing.
Full of Bear Balls, we headed for home. In Bear's parking lot, I set my mapping program to "avoid highways" and plotted a route to Cleveland, Tennessee, intending to take the backroads home. Highway 64 runs almost all the way across the bottom edge of Tennessee. We had to take some serious backroads to get to 64. Highway 74, which we picked up outside of Asheville, turns into highway 19 and runs through Nantahalla Forest in North Carolina. Parts of this road seemed like a death trap. I wore the passenger brake out as we wound our way around the treacherous 2-lane road, past some of the most beautiful scenery you'd ever want to see. I kept praying that we would get on a less curvy section of the road before dark, and we did, but then we entered the Cherokee National Forest. By that time, it was dark, and the road, while not quite as narrow, was just as curvy and treacherous. We reached Cleveland, Tennessee around 7 p.m. Our nerves were about shot, and all we wanted to do was stretch out and relax.
Driving from Cleveland to home was not bad, even though it was foggy. We did a short stretch of interstate from Chattanooga to Sewanee, got on highway 41A, and found 64 pretty soon. It was smooth sailing after that.
Our total route took us from home to Nashville, to Knoxville, to Dandridge, TN, to Asheville, to Cleveland, to Sewanee, to Lawrenceburg, to Selmer, to Somerville, then home. Well over 1,000 miles.
We arrived home to 80 degrees and a tornado watch.
It's good to be home, tornado watch and all.
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