The Biltmore Mansion Beat-boxing Birthday Bash

We all love a good alliteration to start out our holiday weekend. You are welcome friends. I know I've been MIA the last few weeks in the blog world, but between work and this computer acting strange, there has been no blogging.

On Monday, Stephanie and I took a short road trip to Asheville, NC to visit the Biltmore mansion. Because my darling husband says he doesn't care to spend "a bunch of money to just look at an old house." (Thanks, honey.) Also, it was Stephanie's birthday, so major reason to celebrate.

The Biltmore is this castle sized mansion built in the late 1800s by one of the Vanderbilts. He lived there with his wife and one child. But kind of only as a vacation home. How nice.

The house was pretty cool. We could tour 42 of the rooms but there were still many many rooms that weren't part of the tour. There were 43 bathrooms in the house. A huge super cool library with half of Vanderbilt's collection of 23,000 books. And Napoleon's chess set. There was a pipe organ, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, and a gym inside the house. Mostly it was huge and gorgeous. And we were not allowed to take pictures. Which is why I don't have any.

I have no idea how I obtained this picture.

After swooning over all the little tourist shops they have to get you to spend all your money, we took an extensive tour of the gardens. Which were beautiful. And took a very long time to walk through in flip flops and Tom's.

We finally made it to the waterfall. And we saw the boathouse. And the brick bridge that was apparently in The Last of the Mohicans.  And then we had to walk all the way back.

Exhausted and famished, we got some wine and burgers for lunch. A stellar combo, let me tell you.

Seriously yummy.

I told our cutie waiter that it was Steph's birthday. He brought out a 14 layer chocolate and peanut butter cake with a candle. He told me he doesn't sing. But he said he would beat box while I sang. So he beat boxed, I sang happy birthday very loudly by myself, and Stephanie died laughing. Other diners looked at us strangely. Good quality birthday fun was had by all.

And that cake was delicious.

Next up, the winery. We got to taste all the Biltmore wines (they have quite a few) and it was a great way to end the day.

Steph, getting her wine on.

 We loved Biltmore! Now, just to get my hubby here...

Happy Friday friends! My bestie is in town for the weekend and we are planning to get our shop on and fight some white waters in a raft. Yay for long weekends and bffs!