Asheville

Thursday morning, May 12

We leave Pinnacle and are back on the road to Asheville, NC, to get reacquainted with another old friend, Betsy Clark, whom I knew from the summer I spent in Woods Hole after graduating from Columbia (she was on the Columbia faculty at the time and joined my mentor, Teru Hayashi, when he moved his lab to the Marine Biological Laboratory every summer ).  We were planning to just stop to have lunch with Betsy, but all our friends told us how much they loved Asheville and we decided to spend a night and see at least some of the town.  We arrived in the afternoon and visited the River Arts District, where old warehouses and industrial buildings are being converted into studios, allowing a growing community of artists to produce, show and sell their work.  We had to remind ourselves that we’ll be living in our Subaru for the next few months, and acquiring anything which is not consumable is not a great idea.

George and Betsy by her front door.

Betsy moved to Asheville just a few years ago after retiring from her provost’s job at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.  We joined her for a glass of wine at her new home, then all went out for dinner to a nearby Italian restaurant.  We had a wonderful visit and got caught up on each other’s history…also that of some mutual friends, not all of which were happy stories.  This, of course, is an increasingly frequent experience as one grows older.

The next morning, bright and early, we packed up the car  and headed out to visit the 135,000 acre Biltmore Estate,  the main house of which is billed as “America’s Largest Home”.  It was built by George Vanderbilt at the end of the nineteenth century, he hired Richard Morris Hunt to design the house and Frederick Law Olmstead to design the grounds.  It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you have an unlimited supply of money and hire brilliant artists to tell you what to do.  We enjoyed the visit immensely (actually more than we had expected), both that of the house, which is a real museum of art, architecture and history, and of the extraordinary gardens and grounds.  Jan particularly enjoyed the outdoors part of the visit, she’s seriously missed her California garden during our time in Manhattan and any proximity to dirt and blooms immediately raises her spirits.

Biltmore Estate (in between cloudbursts)

A happy camper surrounded by flowers.

...and more.

A bit of color...