We're done here

Brenda is still looking at real estate!!








In the past few days, at the urging of people we met along the way, we took a fast trip to Ashville, North Carolina and visited the Vanderbilts’ Biltmore Estate. Good advice! The Newport mansions ARE summer cottages compared to this place. We have visited Buckingham Palace, Versailles, and numerous of the castles and estates around Europe and North America but, Biltmore takes the cake! The Vanderbilt descendants still own the estate and, still run the farm (2500 acres) and the winery (1,000,000 bottles per year). It takes almost an hour driving slowly through the manicured estate to get from the gate to the house, to the winery, to the farm, and back to the gate. One hell of a lawn to cut!!! All the family’s furniture, many family pictures, all the art and many of the numerous collections still occupy their places from the 1890’s. It is obvious that this place is being run by the private sector as opposed to a governmental agency. The staff can answer any question you ask, they are sharply dressed and, all eager to make one’s visit memorable. Everything, everywhere is in perfect shape.

I have been remiss in not introducing our constant traveling companion – Nellie. Nellie is our Gamin 276C GPS (as in “Navigator Nellie”). Nellie has made the trip extremely easy and enjoyable. She sits in a seat (plastic Saddle actually) on the dashboard, eats very little (a few volts and amps occasionally) and normally only speaks when spoken to. She does, from time to time say “off route….recalculating” when I have failed to follow her previous instructions to the letter. She offers a moving map picture, alpha numeric written instructions and a gentle, female voice offering her directions. She has never once used the somewhat colourful language which I often hear after not following Brenda’s directions. If I don’t follow her route she keeps recalculating a new route to our stated destination until WE finally get it right. Invaluable! If anyone is silly enough to want to do this type of trip, we highly recommend the best damn GPS available and, the best available software to run on it. XM satellite radio is pretty nifty too!

In Atlanta we visited an RV dealer that had 100’s of units lined up for sale. Huge! They fixed our “chronic leak” and tweaked a few other systems. So now we’re “good to go”…………to storage. We close it down and fly home tomorrow (Saturday). Stay tuned for chapter II in November.