LAST DAY IN ASHEVILLE. ART DAY

We got off to an auspicious start when I convinced John not to disrobe at Biltmore Village.

We had coffee and pastry, even though we had just eaten breakfast, at the Well Bred bakery.  See the sign between us in the background?

Vanderbilt was an episcopalian, so e had this charming church built in town. Windows re by MacKenzie, a contemporary of Tiffany and LaFarge.  

These are some tables I want.  Any one would be fine.  

I really want this platter, or anything by this artist.  I'm sorry I didn't buy one yesterday in Black Mountain where they were slightly more than  half the price

The bathroom in the wonderful craft store.  After this we went back to River Arts District.  They have a lot of very small galleries/studios in the area.  This area has to be the pottery center of the world.  There is so much wonderful pottery here.  

When we could no longer put one foot in front of the other we went to Curate, a tapas restaurant (menu below).  We just keep ordering more dishes.  Everything was so good.  When we walked out, the thunderstorm we had carried umbrellas around all day in expectation of, started.  We had parked pretty far away, so we had no other option but to stop for dessert before we went to the car.  

We leave Asheville tomorrow for Madison, Georgia.  It's supposed to still be raining in the morning, but we hope to make it to Athens in time to go to the art museum there.  

SWEETS AND SWEET MUSIC

Best part of the day today.  Sue Richards, one of my harp idols, invited us to come up and play harps today.  She lives about 15 miles out of Asheville on top of a hill with marvelous landscaping and a beautiful view of the mountains in the distance.  

I learned a couple of new tunes and some nice new chords to an old one.  After we left, we headed for Black Mountain.  Directions:  Drive to the end of the road and turn left, when that road ends, turn right at the fire station, when that road ends, turn left again and follow the winding road over the mountain.  Didn't mention we would cross the eastern continental divide.  Anyway, we did find our way to Black Mountain, which is a Grass Valley kind of place.  Population of 8000 but has a hammered dulcimer shop.  I was quite interested in a bowed psaltery, but I managed to restrain myself from buying one.

Anyway, we did find our way to Black Mountain, which is a Grass Valley kind of place.  This ice cream shop made their own waffle cones on site, so you got your ice cream in a slightly warm cone.  That's a nice combination, but my prediction that the end of the cone it would be messier than usual was spot on.  Still worth it.  

 Population of 8000 but has a hammered dulcimer shop.  I was quite interested in a bowed psaltery, but I managed to restrain myself from buying one.

Back in Asheville we had pizza at All  Souls pizza.  Everything is locally sourced and the pizza was delicious.  There is this wonderful baker around here called around here called Farm and Sparrow.  We bought a loaf of bread to bring back to the hotel, but I have no idea why, except that it's so damn good.  

ART, CRAFTS, MOUNTAINS, TREES, and GROVE PARK INN

Thursday morning, our last full day here with this group. We started out the day but visiting the folk art center which is a beautiful building on the Blue Ridge Parkway.  The artisans who show in this museum and gift shop have to be members of the guild, which is the oldest artisan guild in the United States after Paul Revere.  This is a statement made by our guide. I'm not entirely sure there is a guild called Paul Revere, but she could be referring to a silversmith's guild. 

Following that we did a flying visit to the river arts District which is a lot of old commercial buildings that have been repurposed by artists, actually over about the last 30 years, I think. 

Asheville's Renaissance from its economic troubles starting with the Great Depression and going into the 50s is largely a result of its becoming an art destination.  We didn't see a great deal of the artists' studios and showrooms today, because we only had an hour and a half, and they are very spread out, and different people wanted to go different places, which is quite inconvenient with the tour bus. We will come back here after the tour ends. 

Afternoon adventure includes going to Mount Pisgah, which is an area donated by the Vanderbilts as a national park. Views of the Blue Ridge Mountains here are fantastic.   Our last afternoon stop was the North Carolina arboretum. Gorgeous, and not really even at its best.  

Quilt garden.  The black flowers are actually purple.  

Dinner tonight was at the Grove Park Inn.  

I have wanted to see this inn since I first heard about it in about 1996.  It didn't disappoint. The food was delicious, (I had scallops)

the service was excellent - though I've had better dessert --

and our table companions were pleasant. Our tour guide has figured out how to game the system. If you have a tour group of, say, 25 people, they put you in the banquet room and feed you rubber chicken

She found out that if you make a bunch of reservations for six, you get to order off the menu and sit on the terrace. And they'll give you up to three separate checks per table. 

Things are on a very large scale in the Grove Park Inn.  I'm standing in a fireplace.  

HOME, CHURCH, FOOD AND ART

We managed to visit the Thomas Wolfe Museum, Asheville Basilica, have lunch at a nice brewpub called Chestnut, go to the Asheville Art Museum, and still have the afternoon and evening free.  

The Thomas Wolfe Museum is in a house his mother ran as a boarding house.  

She was a good businesswoman, her husband was an alcoholic, and she wanted her own money.  The house was built in the 1890s, as a single family home, but when she became get it, it came with 19 boarders.  I was amazed at how much furniture in the house looks like ours.  This piece is just like the dresser in our guest bedroom, but it's painted.  

The basilica was very interesting.  The builder we a contractor at the Vanderbilt mansion as it was being built, and he didn't like the fact that the Catholic Church was so small, he often had to stand up during the mass.  

We had a very pleasant and funny guide.  I favorited undo it the differenc between a cathedral and a basilica is that a cathedral "belongs to a bishop" and a basilica "belongs to the Pope."  This one has the biggest unsupported dome in the U.S.  He is buried in this church.  

The tour of the museum was awful.  We left after the first twenty minutes when we were still staring at the second piece of art.  I don't think they ever got upstairs, nor did we, because we didn't know there was one.  This has been the only bad thing on this whole trip.  I did see this beautiful glass piece in a back room where we weren't supposed to go.  

We spent the afternoon going to Tom's Shoes, an amazing place that has a myriad of sizes and I got a nice, cute pair of sandals.  They are cute and they are snug enough to actually walk in!!  Then we checked out a few art galleries, shops, and all the other usual stuff.  Had dinner at Cucina 24 which should urges all its food within 100 miles.  We walked back to the hotel from downtown.  I think it only took about a half hour.  This is the first day I have walked more than 10,000 steps, and most days, I didn't even make it up to 10,000.   I want one of these clocks and this dress. 

Tomorrow we go to the River Art center, Pisgah national forest, the Highland Folk Art Center, and having dinner at the Grove Park Inn, which has a wonderful museum of Roycroft furniture

FROM THE RICH AND FAMOUS TO DOWN HOME

The major focus of our trip today is to go to the Biltmore mansion, built by George Vanderbilt, (son of robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt.)

George came to Asheville in the late 1800s and spent five years building this "vacation cottage."  This is an absolutely fabulous house.  I forget how many bedrooms it has but I think it was 30.   It has 43 bathrooms, though.

There is a mile long winding road going up to this house and it was made that way particularly so that you didn't get a glimpse of the house until you were right here, and to build anticipation along the way.  It's quite stunning.

This is very definitely a Downton Abbey lifestyle place with reception rooms, formal dining room which can seat several dozen people, breakfast room, libraries, various man caves, and so on. It's 175,000 square feet.  

One of the things they have put in all the rooms are costumes that were either worn by the family, which are a few, or have been worn in movies of this period. 

The grounds were designed by the famous landscape architect Olmsted (he designed Central Park in nyc among many, many others) and the house was designed by an equally famous architect named Richard Morris Hunt. Both of these gentlemen have life-size portraits, painted by Whisler, hanging in the house,  which is really quite unusual -- to have portraits of the hired help.

After the house tour we went through the enormous gardens. The azaleas are the major thing blooming now, and the rhododendrons should be out in about a week. 

Our tour provider is Mars Hill University, so we had dinner and a concert there tonight.  

The place used to be called French Broad College but you can kind of imagine why they changed the name. (French Broad is the name of a local river. )Mars Hill is the location of the town where the now-university is and it's a Baptist school.  Physically, it's about the size of Sac City College.  

The concert was traditional music, so I was expecting a geezer-ish performer, so you can imagine my surprise when the guy who came out on stage looked like a teenager.  For what it's worth,he said he was 35, but still, not what I expected.  And he was both good and funny.  

Students here are very dedicated. 

ASHEVILLE ARCHITECTURE

Asheville is a very interesting city architecturally. It was settled before the Civil War, and survived because it wasn't big enough for Sherman to bother marching through. They only had one Civil War battle here which apparently was two weeks after the war actually ended and nobody was killed. They were definitely very ambivalent and didn't particularly want to fight on the Confederate side and were surrounded by other Confederate states so they did anyway.  

They had some very forward looking civic leaders throughout the years and had a huge building boom in the 20s, which results in Asheville having more Art Deco buildings than any place but Palm Beach.  

While they are in fact Art Deco buildings, they're not as over-the-top as some others we've seen in other places.

When the depression hit things got really bad in Asheville, and they had millions I guess of dollars of bonds that other cities simply defaulted on and Asheville said they never would. The end result of that was that they had no civic growth even after the depression ended because they were just endlessly paying off all these bonds. This was partly because the holders of the bonds were rich people in Asheville and they were not going to lose their money.  They finally paid off their bonds in the early 40s. And had a big bond burning party where Miss Asheville tried to set the bonds on fire and it took three times to do it.

They had the usual downtown fleeing to the suburbs shopping all problems and that one time we're going to destroy a major part of the down town in order to put a shopping mall downtown. Apparently they didn't have anyone with the vision to drag in  a third rate basketball team and put a sports arena downtown instead.

Fortunately, calmer voices prevailed and they actually saved the downtown which meant they saved a number of these wonderful Art Deco buildings and maintained the original flavor of downtown.

Downtown is now a very busy, very eclectic place with music on every corner, wonderful independent shops. They are very against any kind of chain stores coming in, though they do have Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie.  

The Grove Arcade was a particularly fun place to visit, especially Mission at the Grove, a great A&C furniture and lamp store, Appalachian Strings, where I may go back and buy a mountain dulcimer that you hold like a guitar and which sounds wonderful and which I TOTALLY do not need. 

We also visited today and ate at a place called Pack's pub, Pack having been one of the early civic leaders in town who donated a lot of money to build downtown.  The major downtown square is named Pack Square.  They have some very nice sculptures which show an art trail through town.

The pigs represent the fact that they once herded pigs down the road that later became the Main Street. 

We took a little walking tour of the downtown area today and a bus tour where we went to the Grove Park Inn which is a major attraction around here.

Tonight we have a preview of the Biltmore estate which is what we are going to visit tomorrow.