honeymooners: II
The Grove Park Inn was beautiful. We were in historic main inn, and the view from our room was incredible.
That’s what we saw everyday from the room. It was awesome.
The first full day, Tim and I went to Biltmore.
A random, nice old man offered to take our picture here with my camera when he saw me taking pictures of the mansion.
We spent quite a few hours at Biltmore, taking photos and wandering around the house. You can’t take pictures inside, but we stopped on a balcony to rest (the house is FOUR ACRES!).
Tim decided to take a little nap, Indiana Jones style.
We ate lunch at the converted stable (finally, something with air conditioning!), and it was delicious. We each had a soup and we split a trio of salads. Yum.
Then, we spent a lot of time in downtown Asheville. Everything shuts down early in Asheville, especially on a Sunday, but we managed to have fun anyway.
A random old building that’s really indicative of the architecture there. I loved Asheville.
There were lots of statues downtown, including this one of a little boy on stilts.
The next day we spent the entire day downtown, taking more pictures and enjoying all the stores that had been closed the day before.
After that, we headed back to the hotel to eat dinner on the Sunset Terrace. Gorgeous.
That’s the view from the terrace. Asheville’s off to the left.
We also took a short walk around the grounds, down by the spa and the golf course.
That’s what the inn looks like from down near the spa.
The next day, we hit the road and drove the Blue Ridge Parkway. At least, that was our intention. When we got to a certain part, the parkway was closed with no explanation.
I was very sad.
So, we drove back down the parkway. By this point, we were pretty hungry and decided to get lunch at Barley’s. It was delicious. The beverages were tasty and the pizza was amazing. They can bake beer mash into the dough. Yum.
Then, we headed back on the road to head up to Linville for some hiking and gem mining.
The sign for Gem Mountain. We had fun finding a few gems, some topaz, some emeralds and a huge hunk of amethyst. We had a couple of the rough gems cut and they’re mailing them back to us.
Then, we headed over to Linville Falls. At least, we tried to; we got a little bit lost. After about an hour of searching, we finally found the place and got out to hike. It was worth the wait.
Then, we headed back to Greensboro, to my parents’ house for the night. Then to Raleigh for the day and finally back home.
And that was the honeymoon. We had a great time.
