Our Biltmore Estate day! Asheville, North Carolina

Friday, March 29

Picking back up! So looking back to Thursday 3/28, we drove the Blue Ridge Parkway from Gatlinburg to Asheville and then spent the night in Asheville (in Biltmore Village). I had pre-purchased Biltmore Estate tickets for 10:15 a.m. Friday morning.

The instructions said to be there 45 minutes early to allow time to get from the ticket gate, across the sprawling property, to the parking lot, and to the shuttle to the front door.

Side note- I was surprised that the Biltmore is quite expensive!! Our tickets were $109 per person, which I found to be rather high to tour a mansion. I suppose in fairness it can easily be a full day affair, and includes the gardens, house, winery, audio guide and parking. Just a heads up to anyone planning a visit. Not sure why but I guess I was thinking it might be a like a…. $49.99 type thing. It was not. 🙂

Also, it’s highly recommended to book tickets in advance. They do sell out during busy seasons. When I purchased ours a couple weeks before our visit, some of the morning times on our day were already fully sold out.

For anyone unfamiliar, the Biltmore Estate is an 8,000 acre estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains, built by the very wealthy George Vanderbilt in the late 1800s. It is “America’s Largest Home” and is considered an architectural and design wonder from its time. It has 250 rooms, including 65 fireplaces inside. Oh, and 43 bathrooms.

The house’s main architect, Richard Morris Hunt, also worked on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. The master landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, designed Central Park, among others. So, not your average crew.

Anyway, we parked and then rode the cute trolley shuttle to the gate for our tour.

The House

I had booked the basic self-guided tour + audio guides. I am a fan of audioguides versus regular tour guides!! It’s just nice to go at your own pace. There are even more expensive guided tour options you can choose, including some with special access.

I LOVED this beautiful conservatory room in the entrance of the home. So, so pretty!

I will spare you photos of every room… haha. Actually, you really only see a portion of the mansion, not the entire thing, anyway. But we got to see most of the main areas.

Here’s the main dining room! Very impressive.

This is the “more intimate”, smaller “breakfast room” nearby. I liked this one a lot. The shades are drawn, but from those windows there are stunning views out to the mountains. Basically every room in the house looks out at the mountains! It’s spectacular.

The Billiard Room with fancy ceiling:

Obviously, my favorite room- the LIBRARY. I am such a sucker for those old, wooden libraries!! The audio guide said Vanderbilt was a huge reader and stocked these shelves with books from around the world. Apparently he encouraged his many guests to come and pick books out to borrow during their stay.

Upstairs we toured a bunch of the bedrooms and other sitting areas.

One of the upstairs sitting rooms, in between some of the bedrooms:

The baby’s nursery, again with sweeping views of the mountains, plus a wonderful window seat by the balcony:

The indoor swimming pool was drained, but apparently it was QUITE advanced and highly unique to have an indoor pool in the late 1800s:

We also saw the indoor bowling alley.

There were several huge kitchens, pantries, many servant’s quarters… I imagine it would take many, many people to run a household like that with very frequent guests.

It took a good couple hours to tour the main house.

From there, we went to get a bite to eat on site. They have a fancier restaurant that had a pretty long wait to get in and/or needed reservations. I peeked in and it looked very fitting for the old fashioned style of the mansion. Would have been nice if we’d had more time!

We opted to just get sandwiches and chips from the Cafe area. I think the boys had grilled cheeses and I had some kind of a club sandwich I believe. It was a pretty day with full sunshine! Enjoyable to sit outside.

There’s a whole gift shop area too decorated in sort of “period” style/themed with classical music playing. Very quaint. There was an adorable bookshop, an old fashioned candy store with fresh fudge, a sophisticated Christmas shop, etc.

We browsed around there a bit and then finally headed outside to start touring the gardens.

On the way out, we got some close-ups of the front of the house!

There are big, covered patios all around the back of the house too. Really great views. I can see how this would have been a lovely place for guests to gather on a warm summer day!

The Gardens

The gardens at Biltmore are amazing!! Basically like a full botanical gardens, but right on site.

Being late March, not everything was in bloom yet, though I was actually surprised at how great it still was. I had thought maybe it would be quite limited, but it sounds like their garden designers work hard to make it beautiful in all seasons.

We got lucky in that it’s tulip season!! Love me some tulips. 🙂

This area was beautiful! Wandered around and really enjoyed them.

There are various paths and trails around the gardens. Some areas had more blooms than others.

There is a gorgeous indoor garden/ greenhouse exhibit which was fabulous. Very vibrant colors in there.

Family shot:

On the map we saw a “fishing pond” and “waterfall” marked around ~1/2 mile away, down some long trails.

After circling through some other areas, we headed out that way.

One section had so many flowering trees! Pretty pretty. Especially love seeing spring blooms when it’s still cold/ NOT spring yet back in Wisconsin.

Here’s the pond…. this was a really nice walk. I think many people just tour the house and the main garden area and leave, maybe. It was not crowded at all out this way- very private. This is all still part of the Biltmore Estate.

The waterfall seems to be a man-made waterfall of sorts. Nothing too spectacular, but a good spot to stop for a bit and rest. Of course the boys found rocks to step on/ jump across/ risk slipping on, as usual. LOL.

It was getting quite late by this point- after 3 pm already. I was torn, because we were having a lovely time just wandering around and enjoying the day here.

But, I had also planned on having some late afternoon time on Friday to hopefully see a bit more of Asheville! Thursday night we did get dinner in downtown Asheville, but it got late, so we basically just parked the car and ate. No time to walk around or anything.

We decided to forgo checking out the remaining section- the Biltmore winery- and headed back to the trolley stop to return to the van.

This part of the day didn’t work out quite as smoothly. I hadn’t done too much research about Asheville, but figured we could just park downtown and walk around some. I knew of a few key sights so I programmed an address in the GPS.

Well, I’m not sure if it was just due to being Friday evening, or the Friday before Easter, or if it’s just always a busy area, but we literally could not find a parking spot downtown. We drove around and around in circles.

Ideally we wanted to just bum around for a bit and then maybe grab a beer at one of the many Asheville breweries before heading back to Gatlinburg. (We were not staying in Asheville Friday night.)

It looked like a really nice little downtown! But we finally gave up and went on to Plan B.

A coworker had told me about this huge Sierra Nevada Brewery complex, situated a little ways out of town, maybe 15-20 minutes from downtown Asheville. She said it was enormous and quite the place with a big outdoor patio area. Sounded like our kind of place, albeit a bit out of the way.

Since downtown was a bust, we ended up driving out there instead:

This picture doesn’t really show it, but yes, it’s a HUGE place. With a massive parking lot!! And gigantic beer vats. 🙂

She had said the patio area was really fun, with yard games, sometimes live music, etc. We headed out there, although the temperature dropped a bit and the breeze picked up some. It was a little chilly for my taste, unfortunately. But full sunshine at least!

We got a couple snacky things from the outside bar and just one beer.

The inside restaurant area looked awesome!! We definitely would have loved to have dinner there, but we really wanted to get back to Gatlinburg before dark. So we just had the snack + one drink and then basically hit the road.

Ethan decided he wanted to drive us back to Gatlinburg! On the way back we took the regular highway (not the curvy, scenic route Blue Ridge Parkway we took on the way there).

I rode up front with Ethan. He did great! It was rather busy back through the highway through Asheville until we hooked up with the route out to Gatlinburg. Then it was less busy, but pretty curvy roads and quite a few semi trucks.

A very pretty drive despite not being the “scenic route”. It was good practice for him on all the curves. I did say “nice and easy here” and “careful” approximately 5,423 times, but all was well. 😂😂

I want to say we got back to our Gatlinburg resort around maybe 8 pm. Dropped our stuff off, cleaned up briefly and now were really hungry for a real dinner, since we’d only had the snack at Sierra Nevada.

We decided to run back into town for more pizza at our favorite place, the Gatlinburg Brewing Co. The location of this place was perfect right on our end of town, so no need to get into any of the Gatlinburg traffic or anything.

Ate some of their delicious pizza (seriously, so so good! Go here if you’re ever in Gatlinburg), had another beer and then called it a night by ~10:30 or so.

Whew! A long, full day, especially with the travel back from Asheville.

My only disappointment here was that I don’t feel like we really got to see much of Asheville besides the Biltmore. Ideally we needed a couple more days in Asheville! But it’s okay. I knew this going in and ultimately had decided I wanted more time in the Smokies this time. So, it is what it is. Can’t do it all in just a week.

Will obviously just have to go back to Asheville! And now that we’ve seen the Biltmore, we could skip that next time. 🙂

Up next- our final full day in the Smokies (Saturday), which turned out to possibly be one of my favorite days!