My Travel Memories – Page 5 – To Hither and Yon

My Travel Memories: The Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina

My mom always liked visiting historic houses. I’ve been to bucketloads of them, from homes owned by former presidents, to homes owned by captains of industry, to homes owned by famous authors. I remember some, and even liked them, but the only one that I ever really loved, and wanted to go back to again, is Biltmore.

The Vanderbilts were once the richest family in the world. The family fortune began with a ferry across New York Harbor, which Cornelius Vanderbilt purchased for $100. By the end of his first year in business, he had earned $1,100, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of $18,000 in today’s money. He wasn’t fabulously wealthy. Yet. That would come with time. He used the profits from his first ferry to buy more boats and his wealth grew exponentially. Eventually he moved into shipping in a bigger way, and then into railroads. Vanderbilt owned the New York Central Railway, the hub of which was Grand Central Terminal, and which later had a spur which is now the High Line park. And his wealth didn’t all come from doing business in an aboveboard way. Some came from corruption, such as building cartels with other companies that should have been competitors in order to control prices. He also undercut the competition in price in such a way that his competitors would actually pay him off to keep him out of their territory.

Cornelius’s grandson, George Washington Vanderbilt II, understandably fell in love with the Smoky Mountains and decided to build a summer home in Asheville, North Carolina. He named his summer home “Biltmore.” Biltmore was more than a summer home, however. It was also a working farm and also something of a laboratory in agriculture and forestry.

The centerpiece of the estate was a 250-room mansion which is still the largest private home in the United States. This is the part that first captured my attention. The two rooms that I remembered forever and always were the winter garden and the library. This makes a lot of sense when you consider my personality. Two of the things I love best are books and plants.

The first time we visited Biltmore, I was very young (I think I was seven) and I was convinced that it was a palace. We didn’t see much of the house on our first visit (the owners are restoring the house one room at a time and opening them up to the public as they were restored), so I figured that the part of the house where we didn’t get to visit is where the royal family’s quarters. The winter garden was, of course, the throne room.

The gardens of the house are lovely, as well, with arbors and ponds and a conservatory. But the outside of the estate is not just gardens. George built an entire village for his employees. Many of the house employees lived in the house itself (some of those rooms are now open to the public), but the employees of the farm and George’s scientific experiments lived in the village.

Unfortunately, George was not much of a businessman. The story is that he spent most of his inheritance on the estate and failed to recoup his investment. As a result, in 1930, 16 years after George’s death, George’s daughter Cornelia and her husband opened the estate to the public in order to raise the funds to hold onto the place. And, except for the duration of World War II, the house has been a tourist attraction.

After Cornelia’s death, her two sons split the estate. Her elder son inherited the farm and village and her younger son inherited the house. They have split the property into two entities accordingly, though both are accessible upon payment of the entrance fee.

My Travel Memories: Trips to North Carolina

Several times during my childhood, we went to visit my grandfather at his cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. I found the Smoky Mountains to be breathtakingly beautiful, a feeling that comes over me every time I return (which my son and I did in 2013). I also don’t know if this is cause and effect or just my own personality, but I also now gravitate towards temperate rain forests. If I am ever able to retire, I may well end up in the Smoky Mountains for the Pacific Northwest or, if I am truly financially independent and can go anywhere I want, somewhere abroad such as Ireland or Cornwall.

Looking through our old photo albums (I’m now up to 3,511 pictures scanned in, which is about to become 3,512), I so far have only found two places that we stopped on our way from Chicago to North Carolina.

One of these was the Knoxville Zoo. As fate would have it, my now-ex-husband (maybe I should give him a pseudonym) and I attempted to go to the Knoxville Zoo in 1992, but the zoo looked like it was closed when we were there. There didn’t even look to be anyone in the ticket booth. I don’t think I’d ever seen a zoo that was closed before or since. The San Antonio Zoo is open 365 days a year. They have to feed the animals anyway, so they might as well take in a few dollars from visitors. And lots of people do go to the zoo that day. Upon digging farther, I see that the Knoxville Zoo is not open on Christmas. Perhaps this is because Knoxville is in the Bible Belt?

I don’t remember the Knoxville Zoo. We have photos of it and one has a note saying that I was particularly fond of the bears there, so I know that I must have been there, but other than that, I’ve got nothing. Perhaps if they had looked to be open on our 1992 visit and we’d gone in, I would have been hit by some kind of sense memories. While researching this part of the post, it looks like they’ve since remodeled, so even if I returned today, I doubt that I’d see anything that I recognize. As it is, as with the next two items, I hardly have enough to base an entire blog post on. One can rent wheelchairs at the zoo, and one TripAdvisor review from 2012 says that the zoo is wheelchair accessible, but nowhere that I can find on the official site does it say whether the zoo is wheelchair accessible.

We also stopped in Gatlinburg on our way in or out on every visit. This is the only way I know for certain the years we went to North Carolina. My dad and I would always take the ski lift and then purchase the automatic photo of us that is taken on the way up. I know that at least one time we stayed in a local hotel while we were there. all I remembered was the name of the motel — the Dogwood Motel — but until I started my photo-scanning project I didn’t know that it had been in Gatlinburg. And I do mean “had been,” Google Street View doesn’t show anything in that location anymore, not even a newer motel.

As to things we did while we were in North Carolina, we at some point, went to an amusement park called Frontier Land, which was organized around, just as the name implied, a western theme. The park was in Cherokee, on or near the tribal lands. From what I can tell, the park was on the site where the Harrah’s Casino is today. All I remember of Frontier Land was a train ride and a roller coaster called, I believe, the Mad Mouse.

We also spent time in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on every visit and we went to the Biltmore Estate at least once in my childhood (Alex and I also went to the Biltmore Estate in 2013). I remember enough of those, though, to base an entire blog post on my memories, which will follow in (if things go as scheduled) another six and twelve days.

My Travel Memories: Jupiter Inlet Light, Jupiter, Florida

This may be the last post of my going-to-Florida-up-to-1977 posts. Next, I guess, will be my family’s and my trips to Western North Carolina, where my maternal grandfather had a cabin. We made several trips there, including 1974 and 1977.

Jupiter Inlet Light was built on the premises of the Jupiter Military Reservation. The original structure in that region was Fort Jupiter, built in 1838, during what looks like the Second Seminole War. The government then expanded the property to an entire reservation.

The lighthouse was built atop a mound that was originally thought to be a midden — a garbage pile — left by the natives. It was later proven to be a natural sand dune. The lighthouse was built in 1860.

Lighthouses have something called a “daymark.” This is the color markings and shape of the lighthouse. No two lighthouses are identical. This allows sailors to use them as navigational aids during daytime, as well as at night. One of the most famous daymarks is the black-and-white spiral marking on Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. Jupiter Inlet Light’s daymark is its red color. During its first 50 years of operation, Jupiter Inlet Light was unpainted, and in 1910, it was painted a bright red. During renovations in the early 1990s, the red paint was changed to a more muted brick red color.

Parts of the grounds, including the museum, are handicap accessible. There is a ramp with handrails at the Tindall Pioneer Homestead Exhibit and there is an ADA-compliant path through the nearby natural area. Unfortunately, the light itself is not wheelchair accessible. There are 34 steps to the top of the hill and the top of the lighthouse is accessed by a 105-stair spiral staircase.

I recall being disappointed by Jupiter Inlet Light the first time I saw it. As I pointed out before, the black-and-white pattern of Cape Hatteras Light is one of the most famous daymarks. I was under the impression that all lighthouses were black and white, and when I saw that Jupiter Inlet Light was red, I kind of felt that it was a counterfeit lighthouse. I was also disappointed that we couldn’t climb it. That opportunity wouldn’t come until one of my visits as an adult, since they didn’t have any tours to the top of the lighthouse until 1994.

Now Jupiter Inlet light is one of my favorites. It was, after all, the first lighthouse I can remember having visited. My parents retired to the area near where my cousins lived and whenever my now-ex and I would visit, my folks would take us to dinner in one of several restaurants that were close enough to see the light flashing in the night.

My Travel Memories: Key West, Florida

I finally found the album on our trip to Florida from when I was five. A lot of the space is taken up with brochures and leaflets from things like the jai alai games and greyhound racing that my parents went to with my cousins. There are also the notes that my mom left for the babysitter that watched me and my cousins’ children those nights. There are also post cards from places near Savannah that I do not remember at all, such as Fort McAllister and Tybee Island Light. I don’t know if I ever actually went to those places or if they were in a package of Savannah post cards (all but eight of the photographs in that album were post cards) and my mom just included them.

One thing I sort of remember is our trip to the Florida Keys. My mom always told me that we got about halfway down the Keys and my dad got frustrated and we turned around. However, this photo album has a leaflet from Ernest Hemingway’s home, so it certainly looks like we made it all the way to Key West.

I remember parts of that trip. My mom told me that we were going to visit some islands. My only frame of reference for “island” was the television show “Gilligan’s Island,” so I basically spent the whole trip looking for lagoons and sandy beaches. I didn’t realize until years later that every time we were on land for most of that trip, even without any visible shoreline, was still on an island.

My now-ex, Alex, and I went to Key West in 2003, and so I have better memories of that trip. We drove down, stayed the night, and then toured the island the next day. On that trip, we went to the Southernmost Point in the Continental United States, Key West Lighthouse, and we returned to Ernest Hemingway’s house (though I didn’t realize that I had been there before). And, since Alex has always been fond of animals, we spent quite a lot of time stalking the gypsy chickens of Key West.

Early on the morning of our trip to Key West, I heard a vague sound that sure sounded like a rooster in the distance. I told my now-ex that I had heard a rooster and he doubted me. Then I heard it again. This time he heard it, too. So we headed out for our adventure and there they were. Chickens. Everywhere. No one is really sure how they got there. It is likely that they are descendants of several waves of chickens, from birds brought by early European settlers to animals released once cockfighting became illegal. The gypsy chickens are numerous and reproduce quickly, so the Key West Wildlife Center have begun exporting them to the Florida mainland. As they are feral, they are actually excellent predators of insects and other pests. Several farms on the mainland use Key West gypsy chickens as part of their pest control plan. Alex, who was three at the time, had just begun learning to take pictures, so we gave him a disposable camera (he went through several on this trip) and let him have at it.

My Travel Memories: Lion Country Safari, Loxahatchee, Florida

Lion Country Safari is a drive-through wild animal park with its primary focus, as the name implies, on the animals of the African savannah. Lion Country Safari was founded in 1967 as an attempt to bring a real safari experience to the people of the United States. The park originally only had a pride of lions, but over the past nearly 50 years the park has grown to over 900 individuals of over 20 species.

Traditionally, the animals have walked free, but safety concerns have led the owners of the park to install fences between the cars and the lions and chimpanzees, in particular.

However, during my visits to Lion Country Safari, at least two during the years before 1977 and one 2002, all of the animals, including the lions, roamed freely through their habitats; today, you can still have that experience with the herbivores such as the zebras and giraffes. On some of our trips, the animals got right up to our car, which is an amazing experience. On others, the animals were farther back in their habitats, so it didn’t really matter if they were free-roaming or not. An animal way back there might as well be behind a fence. You kind of have to take your chances on each visit. Apparently the animals are more active and therefore, more interesting, in the morning and while it is raining, so take that into account when making your plans.

Since Lion Country Safari is a drive-through park, it is as handicap-accessible as your vehicle is. There is now a walk-through park that I don’t seem to recall from other visits. The website for Lion Country Safari says that the walk-through park is designed to be handicap-accessible, though a wheelchair user may need assistance getting into and out of the petting zoo area.

My Travel Memories: Food at the Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney World, Florida

On my first and probably second trips to Walt Disney World (assuming those trips would have been around first and third grades), we mostly ate crummy hamburger and hot dog type food from the “quick service” outlets like the oddly named Pinocchio Village Haus.

Then when I was in I think it was fourth grade (I really wish we could find those photo albums!) my teacher mentioned that there was an actual sit-down restaurant upstairs in the castle. This was the also oddly named King Stefan’s Banquet Hall. I say that this name was odd because King Stefan was Sleeping Beauty’s father. Cinderella’s father didn’t have a name, and besides that, he wasn’t the king and wouldn’t have belonged in a castle. As the 21st Century approached, the suits at Disney apparently decided that a woman could be the host of her own damn banquet hall and the name was changed to Cinderella’s Royal Table.

My teacher told me that we had to have reservations some number of months ahead of time, so one of my parents (likely my mom) got on the phone and made them. And it was wonderful. I was kind of an unusual child. Most “kiddie foods” like hot dogs did little for me, unless they were very good, and I was a teenager by the time the chicken nugget became a common thing (discovering that one of my friends loved McNuggets may well have damaged our relationship permanently). I did like fried chicken, but it had to be an identifiable part.

I loved King Stefan’s Table, but it was expensive, so it was a one-time thing. Fortunately, EPCOT was on the horizon by then, and that would change my eating-at-Disney habits for good. But that’s a story for 1982 and not for Before 1977.

I do have one last Magic Kingdom eating experience to share. It fits in with the theme of “food at the Magic Kingdom,” but doesn’t fit in chronologically. When my now-ex and I went to Walt Disney World in 1992, we bought a cookbook called Cooking with Mickey, Volume II. This book had a recipe called “Freedom Fighter Chicken.” My first thought was that sounded more like a superhero from a funny animal comic than an entree, but it’s really good. It has chicken and vegetables in a sauce made from white wine and white wine Worcestershire sauce. Freedom Fighter Chicken comes from the Liberty Tree Tavern in the Magic Kingdom, which neither my folks nor I had ever noticed was there during our 1970s visits, but I’m pretty sure it must have been, and it probably served real food at the time. In 2003, my folks, my now-ex, my son, and I all went to the Liberty Tree Tavern for dinner. Freedom Fighter Chicken is apparently a lunch menu item, because dinner is a family-style Thanksgiving dinner, which, as one would expect, was a little steep, but very good thus worth the money.

My Travel Memories: Walt Disney World, Orlando (more or less), Florida

Where to start?

Well, the obvious place is 1972, my first visit, but I was awfully young and don’t remember a whole lot. I remember taking the monorail from the parking lot to the park. My mom wanted to take the ferry boat, but I refused (more on my old fear of boats later). I also remember some of the kiddie rides, like the Dumbo ride and the Teacup ride (which was my very favorite for probably entirely too long). I remember, without a great deal of enthusiasm, the food. I think that was the visit where we ate at Pinocchio Village Haus restaurant with a German name, which is exceedingly odd for a restaurant that takes its theme from a movie based on a book that’s set in Italy. Casa di Pinocchio would be more appropriate, I would think.

Sadder than the German theme was the food, if I recall. I seem to remember fast-food type hamburgers and not much else. I don’t think there were chicken nuggets. The chicken nugget had been invented, but no one had heard of them yet. That was still a good eight years in the future.

My parents and cousin went on the Haunted Mansion ride. I don’t think I went on the Haunted Mansion on that trip yet. I was still pretty little and very imaginative. Even though it was all in fun, I probably would have had problems with some of it, like the head in the crystal ball. That would have totally freaked me out. I do wonder who watched us, though. The oldest child in our group would only have been nine at the time. Maybe my cousin’s husband watched us.

We didn’t take many, if any, photographs at Walt Disney World that trip. I seem to recall all of the Disney World pictures in that photo album as being postcards. Our old Swinger camera was pretty bulky and really didn’t travel very well.

This was the first of many trips to Walt Disney World. We originally did it as a day trip from my cousins’ house, but one year my family stayed in a hotel in Orlando. If I recall, that hotel was the first time any of us ever saw a digital hotel room lock. I think that was the 1974/1975 school year. Since they reprogrammed the lock for every visitor, they let us keep the key and I brought the room key back to show in school. My most recent trips were in 1982, 1992, and 2003. I will likely be back to discuss them in those years.

And why do I refer to Walt Disney World as being “more or less” in Orlando? Because the resort is not actually in Orlando. Walt Disney World is actually southwest of the city limits. Most of it is in Bay Lake, Florida, and the rest is in Lake Buena Vista, Florida. But the popular perception is that it is in Orlando, so I figured I’d better reference that, rather than putting either of the other two cities as the location.

(originally posted June 24, 2015)

My Travel Memories: Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida

I was thinking that my next My Travel Memories post would be the start of what will likely turn out to be a bunch of posts on Walt Disney World, but I just looked at a map, and apparently the Kennedy Space Center is ever-so-slightly farther north than Walt Disney World. So, in accordance with my north-to-south (to the extent I can piece my earliest memories together) literary itinerary, the Kennedy Space Center is next.

The Kennedy Space Center is the place that all of the manned space flights since 1972 launched from. This means that every space shuttle launch took off from Kennedy. When my folks retired to Florida, they could see the space shuttle launches from the beach near their house. I never visited during a launch, though, so I didn’t get to see them. I don’t know if I would have wanted to have seen it, either. After the Challenger disaster in 1986, any time a space shuttle launched, I watched metaphorically through my fingers.

I’ve needed to do some research into when I went to the Kennedy Space Center. It was definitely before the space shuttle era. I am virtually certain that it was still Cape Kennedy at the time because I can remember telling an adult that we went to Cape Kennedy and the adult was confused at first because she knew it only as Cape Canaveral. So that means that it was most likely in or before 1973, because they changed the name of the cape from Cape Kennedy back to Cape Canaveral on October 9, 1973 and we always went on vacation before October.

I suspect if I went back today there would be things that would trigger sense memories in me, but from here, sitting in my breakfast nook in Texas, the only thing that seems to have made a really lasting impression on me was what I am pretty sure was the Apollo 14 command module. I remember it because it was less shiny and silver than I was expecting. It was actually a rather unattractive shade of brown. Apollo 14 was in 1971, so that narrows the date even farther, to sometime between 1971 and 1973.

Edited to Add: I found our 1972 Florida trip album and there is no mention of the Kennedy Space Center in it. Since we basically went to Florida every year during my early childhood, it looks like 1971 or 1973 are likely to be our target year.

(originally posted July 6, 2015)

2/1/2019 On or around November 28, 2018, I realized that I need to start monetizing this blog. To that end, I’m starting to put what I call Gratuitous Amazon Links into my posts. As of January 12, 2019, I’m going back to add GALs to my older posts. If I can’t find anything exactly on-topic to the post, I’m choosing from among the highest-rated items on the same topic as the post. For example, for a post on a park, I’ll search Amazon for books on parks and choose one of the ones with the highest reader ratings. Here is the GAL for this post:

Earth and Space: Photographs from the Archives of NASA Nirmala Nataraj (Author), NASA (Photographer), Bill Nye (Preface)

My Travel Memories: St. Augustine, Florida

St. Augustine, Florida is definitely a place that I visited both before and after 1977. I went there with my parents in the 1970s (and maybe visited it with my mom, aunt, and uncle in the late 1960s if memory serves) and in 1989 and then, for good measure, I made a return visit with my now-ex-husband in 1992.

In the United States, most people makes a big deal out of the Mayflower, like it is the very beginning of United States history. I’ve even read a (pretty bad) young adult book in which the protagonist’s love interest is supposedly a descendant of Mayflower immigrants, as if that made him royalty or something along those lines. As a result, it made a real impression on me when I was told that St. Augustine was the “oldest city” in the United States. That is, of course, an oversimplification, since St. Augustine is technically the oldest continuously occupied European-established settlement in the United States. The Native Americans had cities long before the Europeans got here.

St. Augustine got its name because the coast of Florida was first sighted by the settlers of the area on August 28, 1565. August 28 is the feast day of St. Augustine. If they’d been running a day earlier, the city would be named “Santa Monica,” and if they’d been a day later, I don’t know what they would have named it, since August 29 is the Feast Day of the Martyrdom of St. John the Baptist. Maybe they just would have gone with “San Juan de Bautista,” or “San Juan” for short. Spanish settlers did this a lot. I live in a city that was named for the day that the missionaries met the local Coahuiltecan tribe, the Payaya,

There are, as one would expect, a lot of historical buildings in St. Augustine, though no wooden buildings older than 1702, because the British burned the city in that year. There is the “Oldest Wooden Schoolhouse,” which is not actually the oldest at all, since the actual oldest schoolhouse in existence in the United States, to our ability to determine, is on Staten Island and is roughly 20 years older than the St. Augustine schoolhouse.

It was always kind of a thrill to walk down the streets of St. Augustine and think about how this is as old as it gets (in terms of permanent European settlements at least) in the United States. Probably the most interesting building to visit, as far as I am concerned, is the Castillo de San Marcos, which presumably was founded on or around April 25, the Feast Day of St. Mark the Evangelist. The Castillo de San Marcos is older than 1702, since it was built of coquina, a sedimentary rock formed of shells bonded together, and thus it survived the 1702 fire.

Some of the most memorable buildings of St. Augustine are comparatively modern. In the late 1800s a tycoon by the name of Henry Flagler moved to St. Augustine. He commissioned a number of elaborate buildings which are there to this day. Among the buildings he commissioned are the Ponce de Leon Hotel (which is now home to Flagler College), the Alcazar Hotel (now the Lightner Building, containing a museum and the St. Augustine City Hall), and the Memorial Presbyterian Church (which is still a church).

Author’s Note: I wrote this and queued it up for June 26, then remembered bits and pieces of another place I’ve been, farther north in Florida than St. Augustine: Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park in White Springs, Florida. I don’t really remember much about it, though. I remember a building with a colonnaded porch (the museum, apparently), trees covered with Spanish moss, and my mom explaining that the correct name of the river is “Suwannee” and not “Swanee.” That last is how I came to be pretty sure that the park I remember is the one in Florida and not the Stephen C. Foster State Park in Georgia. The river looks closer to the Florida park than it does to the Georgia one. I also cannot see any buildings with columns in any photographs of the Georgia park.

(originally posted June 26, 2015)

My Travel Memories: Savannah, Georgia

I really thought that I had visited Savannah both before and after 1977, but apparently my two visits were in 1972 and in 1977. As a result, much like Mammoth Cave National Park, my memories of Savannah are sketchy.

Our trips to Savannah, to some extent, suffered from the same things our visits to South Florida did. We were visiting family, so, as one of the kids of the family, we spent a lot of time watching television and eating in. I do remember that while we were in Savannah we ate at three restaurants — The Pirates House (in 1972), a boarding-house-themed restaurant that must have been Mrs. Wilkes Dining Room, and Krystal Hamburgers (both in 1977). Continue reading “My Travel Memories: Savannah, Georgia”