Sixteen years ago this coming fall I proposed to my then girlfriend while visiting the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Last week, we took a 1000-mile road-trip and revisited the scene of the crime for the first time since 1993. These are thoughts and observations from that most recent adventure.

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About The Biltmore

A little background may be in order for those of you not familiar with the Biltmore.

The Biltmore is our country's largest private residence with 250 rooms. When it was built in the 1890's by George Vanderbilt, the estate occupied 125,000 acres or 195 square miles of North Carolina. But don't think that this was pristine wilderness back then. Much of the property had been clear cut and worn out from years of farming when Vanderbilt acquired it.

Over the years Vanderbilt's workers planted about 3 million trees. The Vanderbilt's sold almost 87,000 acres to the federal government in 1914 to form the basis of the Pisgah National Forest. Other land was also divested over the years, but today the estate still has 8000 acres and is owned by the grandson of George Vanderbilt.

Besides tours of the mansion and its gardens, the estate features several excellent restaurants, a very nice hotel and spa, the most visited winery in the United States and numerous outdoor activities.

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Thoughts About DOTs

Driving to Asheville from Cape requires cutting across Southern Illinois and diving down through Kentucky and across a huge swath of Tennessee before arriving in Western North Carolina. In that 500-mile journey, you see a lot of handiwork of the Department of Transportations for three of those four states.

From the amount of roadwork being done in Kentucky and Tennessee, I guess those states are banking on "stimulus" transportation funds from the feds. Someone should tell K-DOT and T-DOT that just because they've lined up miles of orange barrels does not mean that a project is "shovel-ready."

You need to actually do some work.

Speaking of orange construction barrels, I wonder how Department of Transportation officials determine just how many miles of road should be barricaded off when they undertake a given roadwork project?

I sometimes think the Standard Operating Procedure is to send two guys off in a truck loaded with cones who are told not come back until they're empty.

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Tennessee City Names

Tennessee is an interesting state for city names. If you can put "ville" after a name they've done it in Tennessee. We drove by Clarksville, Hendersonville, Nashville, Cookeville, Crossville, Pikeville and Knoxville.

At some point, Tennesseans apparently ran out of proper names to slap "ville" onto and started using handy common words. I base this observation on "Lawnville" which I also noticed on the drive.

I wonder in which part of the state are "Rockville" and "Treeville" located?

The Cracker Barrel restaurant chain was founded in Tennessee. I'm not sure which town. "Porchville" or "Rockerville" would be appropriate.

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An Amazing Stay in Cookeville

For our drive down to Asheville, we decided we would split the trip in two and stay the night in Cookeville, Tennessee. Cookeville is a nice town, in many ways similar to Cape. Both are college towns. They are the home to Tennessee Tech that SEMO competes against in the Ohio Valley Conference.

I noticed as we were arriving at Cookeville that T-DOT had an "Attractions" sign just before the exit. I pointed this out to my wife that one of the two featured "Attractions" of Cookeville was something called "The Most Amazing Quilt Shop." Since quilting is one of her interests, after we checked in and gassed up both ourselves and our SUV, we tried to find this amazing attraction.

I came to the conclusion that if T-DOT has any kind of vetting process for what it will put on the Attractions signs preceding Interstate exits in Tennessee, it is a weak one.

The shop that we eventually found was tucked in a strip mall behind a church and was a fairly modest looking business with no more square footage than our local Tuesday Morning.

Granted, I'm no quilter so perhaps it was truly amazing, but I didn't think it warranted being a T-DOT endorsed "Attraction."

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Beer Run Worthy of The Bandit

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Hershey, Pennsylvania for a trade show. While in Hershey, I sampled numerous bottles of Yuengling, a regional beer that I fell in love with. I know it's probably wrong of me to love a beer, but it is sooooo good.

Yuengling -- pronounced ying-ling -- is the oldest brewer in the US, but its products are typically only available on the east coast.

Since this was a road-trip and I did not have to hassle with the restrictions of flying, I knew this was a good opportunity to bring back a stash of my beloved beer.

While in Asheville, I visited a large grocery store named Ingles. They had a huge beer selection, but I couldn't find my lovely lager among their dozens of specialty brews. We then stopped at a quilting store in a strip mall with another grocery called Harris Teeter.

While my wife did her thing at the quilting store, I tottered off to the Teeter. It also had a very respectable beer selection, but my cherished brew was not among the specialty beers. But then I glanced over to the Big Brewery Case and there -- nestled next to the Miller -- was the sweet suds I was searching for.

Yuengling Traditional Lager, Yuengling Black and Tan and Yuengling Light.

I grabbed two 12 packs of the Traditional and one of the Black and Tan. Perhaps the Light is very good, but if I'm going to drive 1000 miles for a beer run, then I want every damn calorie available.

Of course, this made me realize that I had just overlooked Yuengling while at the first grocery store. We stopped there the morning we were getting ready to return to Cape since I had room to squeeze another case in the back of our SUV.

I'm not sure if I broke some kind of law hauling three cases of beer across multiple state lines, but I had visions of Smokey and The Bandit playing out in my mind as we drove home to Cape.

If we'd only brought my wife's Miata she could have played Burt Reynolds to my Jerry Reed. She could have kept the Smokeys at bay with her sporty little car and its top speed of about 70, while I maneuvered our creaking SUV packed full of my beloved brewskies through the Blue Ridge Mountains and back to Missouri.

When we did get home from Asheville, I ran into the liquor department manager at Schnuck's who told me that Yuengling is slowly expanding and that we probably won't see it available in Missouri for at least a couple more years.

That was not the news I was wanting to hear. I decided to check the Yuengling website for more information and discovered that the brewery has recently made a concerted push into Tennessee including a distributor in Dyersburg.

Yes, Dyersburg. Less than two hours a way.

Beer run, anyone?

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I skipped a week of blogging last week since I was on vacation and without a computer. Even with my reduction in output, my Google stats still managed to go from 15,100 to 21,100. My Yahoo searches jumped from 16,200 to 25,300. I should go on vacation more often.

My cat's Twitter account is now up to 39 followers. Her Twitter account is patchthecat.