Vacation of August 2011

We went to South Carolina and North Carolina.
  We started with flying in to Atlanta, Georgia , renting a car and driving to Columbia, South Carolina. To visit are family friends the Manning.

This is their beautiful home, I wish I had took pictures of the the inside of it for you, It was a dream home for me I loved it. It has a closed in veranda in the back we sat in the night we stayed with them. So very relaxing to sit there and listening to the outside crickets and frogs while enjoying after dinner beverages and great company.

The next day we went to the Zoo.

Here are some of the animals we saw .

This flower was there at the Zoo. I had to go to a lot of effort to get  the right angle.  I had to ask permission to go inside a block off area. It was worth it!

 Then we headed over to the their State Capital Building, it's very old and still has marks from cannon balls being shot at it from the the civil war.

Great place to visit. 

Now we're headed off to go to Asheville, North Carolina.

First place we went to is the Biltmore Estate.

This place is awesome is has it all.

The home was built in1895 by George Vanderbilt. It's said to be the largest home in America, with 250 rooms. Eight thousand acres of forest, farm lands, gardens, restaurants and a winery.

We took the tour of the house then we ate lunch in the Stables.

It's a restaurant now but it really used to be the sables. It had Great food too!

Afterwards we walked around the gardens.

The lily ponds were full of insects I could of stayed there for hours taking pictures. but there was to much to see so we moved on the the flower gardens.

There was quite a bit of wild life.

We walked around for hours we spent the whole day there. I took a lot more pictures. Maybe some other time I'll show you more but for now were moving on further along on the vacation.

The next day we rode this trolley all around down Asheville

We saw lots of beautiful old building.

It's very green here.

We stopped in for some tea

at the tea room cafe.

Such a fun place. Not to sure Shawn enjoyed as much as me.

Caught someone eating lunch.

Shawn did get to go some where he liked too

The next day we took a all day drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Talk about a beautiful drive Is was awesome!

We found a hiking trail to the falls  it was hard though because I had flip flops on . 

 Not good shoes to hike in.

That's about all of the pictures for now. We went to a town called Cherokee and went though a museum I loved it, then we went back to the hotel. It was a great vacation.