Do you have a spare two months coming up soon — before it snows? If so, you can drive a road trip route that hits all of the national parks in the continental United States, in just under 15,000 miles, and celebrate the National Park Service’s 100th anniversary.
My parents were fans of summer camping trips, probably because it was the cheapest way for us to travel, and I’ve been to many of these national parks. But not all of them. This is a fun goal for our retirement travels!
The link is shared from House Beautiful’s Facebook page and I just discovered this wonderful feature. It’s called “embed” and you get to it by clicking on the carat in the top right hand corner of a Facebook post. The code embeds directly into your blog post and voila! You’ve shared something wonderful from Facebook.
Last week’s cow photo was fun for me to share, and you liked it too.
I’ve been learning how to shoot animals with their personality showing
Given the cow’s popularity, I’ve decided to do a series with the animals with personality I shot with my photo class. Just remember, you asked for it! Continue reading →
What pairs well with the biggest private home in the United States? Why, one’s own forest and mountain, of course.
On our visit to the Biltmore Estate we marveled at the beautiful landscape surrounding George Washington Vanderbilt’s mansion. It is even more amazing when you realize that most of this landscape was immature during Vanderbilt’s lifetime. He and his very famous landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, both died before really being able to appreciate the glory of what they designed.
Biltmore Estate forests with view of Blue Ridge Mountains
This week’s tablescape was inspired by my vintage Ferris wheel (I talked about its history here), and seemed the perfect week to showcase it in Cuisine Kathleen’s “summer whimsey” tablescape party.
J. Chein Disney Ferris Wheel
Growing up, we traveled in the summer since my father was a teacher. Every June, we packed up the trailer and headed off on a long car trip. The longest — and my brother says the most interminable — trip we ever took was from Ohio to California. It was on that vacation in about 1965 that I first went to Disneyland and was enchanted by Walt Disney’s vision. Continue reading →
The original photo of the two-story butler’s pantry at Biltmore is courtesy of The Biltmore Estate.
Dish rooms are my joy, my thrill, my raison d’être. Well, maybe not quite that much, but y’all know how much I love dishes.
When we began to plan our visit to the largest private home in the United States, I hoped to see lots and lots of dishes. Gobs of dishes.
Located in Asheville, North Carolina, Biltmore House and its surrounding estate was imagined and created between 1889 and 1895 by George W. Vanderbilt and his all-star team of Richard Morris Hunt and Frederick Law Olmsted. It is still held privately by descendants of George and Edith Vanderbilt and is open to the public. There is a general tour of the house with an available audio guide that takes about two hours. There are also auxiliary guided tours of areas that are not on the main tour. We spent two glorious days exploring this beautiful estate.
In addition to the regular tour of the house, we also signed up for the Butler’s Tour, which took us “downstairs” into kitchen and mechanicals areas not seen on the other tours. This two-story butler’s pantry just took my breath away.
I’ll share lots more about our trip to the glorious Biltmore Estate, but today I’m going to start with a visit to the gift shops on the grounds of the Estate. After all, it’s dishes that we are interested in — right? Continue reading →
Carl and Sally Gable were looking for a summer home in New Hampshire, but ended up buying a historically-protected villa in a small town outside of Venice — the Villa Cornaro. Built by Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio in 1552, the Villa Cornaro is considered one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. It is owned by Americans who fell in love with Italy, with Palladian architecture and with the Villa Cornaro. Palladian Days: Finding a New Life in a Venetian Country House is based on Sally Gable’s diaries about the process of buying a home in Italy.
I fell in love with the book based on its cover — very Edith Wharton and all that — and found it to be an interesting look into the world of Americans learning to care for an Italian treasure while also learning to live in another culture. Unlike Tim Park’s sardonic view of Italy and Frances Mayes’s romantic love affair with Italy, Sally Gable’s prose is elegant, precise, and matter-of-fact while still offering a passionate vision of the expatriate dream of owning a villa in Italy. It’s just that most of us don’t own and live in an international monument.
As I read this book, I couldn’t help but think money pit, money pit. I’ve renovated a number of homes in my day, and I know that the amount of money the Gables have poured into this property must be astounding. Carl I. Gable is a retired lawyer and businessman, and Sally Gable is a retired church musician, and Mrs. Gable is pretty reticent about talking about money in her stories. Although most of the restoration had already been done by the villa’s former owners, Richard and Julia Rush, I found it unrealistic how she often glossed over what must have been very difficult decisions. The fact that they both sit on some very prestigious boards of directors gives us a glimpse into why they don’t seem to worry very much about what things cost. I don’t know exactly why this bugged me, but it did.
Click into the photo to see the recipe for creamy butternut squash risotto
Sally Gable also includes recipes and a discussion of risotto that had my tastebuds drooling. I do love a good memoir with talk about food!
This photo of Villa Cornaro is courtesy of TripAdvisor
A visitor to the Villa Cornaro tells Sally that she is lucky that she and her husband share a passion for the same thing — renovating, restoring, and living in an architectural treasure. As she reflects on this comment she says:
How fortuitous, how unlikely, that we both find in our villa, in Venice, in Italy a source of such infinite fascination.
Villa Cornaro has been the cornerstone of it all. Like a great athletic coach, the villa is at once a disciplinarian, a trainer, and a motivator.
You can step into new stages and play new roles, the villa whispers. Find your hidden pools of strength, open yourself to see art with fresh and wider-ranging eyes, examine whole new palettes of color in your everyday life, vault past barriers of language, culture, and habit.
All to better care for me, my villa tells me (247).
Click into the photo for more information about Villa Cornaro.
The Gables open their house to visitors and also host local events in the gardens. If you cannot get to Venice to see Villa Cornaro anytime soon, perhaps you are able to visit a Palladian style architectural treasure in the United States, Drayton Hall near Charleston, South Carolina, that is said to have been based on the Villa Cornaro. Thomas Jefferson admired Andrea Palladio’s work and used another building, Villa La Rotanda, for the design of his home at Monticello.
You can also visit The National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. which tells “the stories of architecture, engineering, and design.”
Got my bags, got my reservations, Spent each dime I could afford. Like a child in wild anticipation, I long to hear that, “All aboard!”
Music and lyrics by Bud Green, Les Brown and Ben Homer (1944)
As I was thinking about family this week, remembering that August 22 would have been my mother’s 83rd birthday, I decided to memorialize my parents by a trip through our travel memory lane. My father took all of the old slides with pictures of my brothers and me and converted them to photos. He gave us a photo scrapbook of all of these photos and they are a precious treasure trove that chronicles our growing up and our travels.
This is a personal journey that I’m making today, so if you’re not family or a really good friend, you may find you want to skip my grainy photolog. 🙂 Or maybe you have a similar set of photos in your closet that you’re willing to share …
Flower Garden at Mount Vernon
Although there are lots of photos of me as a baby, it appears that we mostly stayed home or visited family in my early years. My father annotated the backs of the photos and he thought this first one was taken in about 1957 at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home in Virginia. I turned five that summer and my brother was two. Since Dad was a teacher, we often took extended driving trips in the summer, dragging a variety of camping trailers behind us.
Here’s a more current version of the garden at Mount Vernon.
My dad’s side of the family was from Cincinnati and we used to go to visit relatives fairly frequently. A visit to the Cincinnati Zoo was a treat, and Dad could not resist taking a leggy photo of Mom. Since she’s not pregnant here, this is probably about 1957.
Next on the memory lane is me at John Bryan State Park in western Ohio. Dad says this photo was taken about 1958. We always used to go on a fall color trip every year.
My grandparents lived near Kansas City, so we sometimes visited them there. We also must have made a visit to the Harry S. Truman Library in about 1958.These two photos appear to be taken from about the same spot, but the second (professional) one has a lot more polish and landscaping!
Those yellow blobs on the hill behind us are all daffodils!
The hillside of daffodils still exists, and can be seen here via these copyrighted photos. Aullwood Garden Metropark is still a beautiful place to visit in Englewood, Ohio.
With our little family of five complete and mobile, we began to travel further afield.
Occasionally my mom took a picture, but she didn’t seem to get the knack of focusing either.
In 1964, we went to the World’s Fair in New York. My husband, who had a traveling childhood similar to mine, remembers that they served $2.00 hamburgers and everyone thought that was highway robbery!
I fell in love with the Appalachian Mountains all over again in 1967.
By the time I was sixteen, I had pretty much stopped traveling with my parents and was working during the summer to save money for college. The love of travel that they instilled in me never went away, however, and it’s a rare day that doesn’t find me dreaming about the next reservation to travel I’m going to make.
