Page 22 - The Magazine of AAA Ohio Auto Club – September 2020

Take a
Longer Drive and
Discover Asheville
By John T. Garcia
So, you want to drive slightly further than the grocery store or local restaurants, but don’t have any ideas about where to go? If you have not
discovered Asheville, North Carolina, it might be time to head south and find this gem in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Getting to Asheville takes about 7 hours by car from central Ohio and there are three main ways to get there, so for a variety, you could take one route there and a different route back. (Major airlines do fly from Ohio to Asheville, but this feature is “Great American Drives.”)
Two routes to Asheville will take you through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain of mountains that run from Canada to Alabama, and features the largest peak east of the Mississippi River. Rising to 6,684 feet, Mount Mitchell is less than an hour from Asheville, less than five miles off the Blue Ridge Parkway.
But once you get to Asheville, you might not want to leave. It offers the perfect blend of pictorial panoramas with a casual downtown, despite being the largest city in western North Carolina.
Here are some things to check out once you arrive in
Photo: ExploreAsheville.com-Rob Travis
town. As of publication, all places mentioned were open and operating, but double-check before finalizing plans as things are continually changing.
THE BILTMORE HOUSE
While nature brings in visitors and keeps the locals,
it is a house that attracts the most attention to the city, bringing in more than 1 million visitors a year. Built in
the late 1800s for George Washington Vanderbilt II, the Biltmore House is the largest privately owned house in the United States, with more than 135,000 square feet of living area. The 250-room mansion was completed in 1895 and includes 35 bedrooms, 43 bathrooms and 65 fireplaces. Besides the house, the 8,000-acre estate is home to lush gardens and forest trails.
After Vanderbilt finished his French Renaissance home, he brought in Frederick Law Olmsted, known
as the master of American landscape architecture, to design the estate’s gardens. Olmsted had already made his mark by developing New York’s Central Park and the surroundings of the U.S. Capitol.
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