Thursday, October 28, 2010

Visiting the Vanderbilts

We headed over to the Vanderbilt place to check out how the other half lives (of course, at this point, it's not so much the "other half" as the super-rich 1%), but first we stopped to fortify ourselves at the diner.


I had a terrific burger cooked just the way I liked and everything was really fresh. My only disappointments: they have those coated fries with extra starch (bleh!) and they do not have real mayonnaise. But we did some more antiquing and saw a wonderful sight: an older woman in a leopard skin coat walking a cat in the rain. Wonderful!

Next we headed over to the Vanderbilt House. It's not quite as magnificent as the Biltmore, of course -- they only came here for a month each in the spring and fall -- but it is quite nice. The way they give you the tour is to take you through the experience of arriving there to spend the weekend as their fellow millionaire friends so you can see how the day was spent, but then you get to leave through the servants' area, so it brings you back down to earth. It was a bit rainy off and on, but a lovely day nonetheless.







Driving home last night there was a whole lotta fog: the effects of rather too warm weather for this time of year and a lot of rain. A bit nerve-wracking for driving, but it always looks so cool. Spooky in time for Halloween, eh?

4 comments:

Todd Mason said...

Poor cat!

You seem to go to Great Houses when in the company of folks...

Miracle Whip? AKA Spackle with sugar?

C. Margery Kempe said...

I can't figure it out: am I being goaded into considering ways to be prosperous, or simply into acknowledging that I will never be what one considers to be "wealthy" in that sense? It's a mystery. You'll note this is seldom my idea.

Miracle Whip: shudder.

pattinase (abbott) said...

We visited there a few years ago and I realized again, I hate the rich.

C. Margery Kempe said...

Indeed! Both here and at the Biltmore, the narrative is how much nicer the Vanderbilts were than a lot of rich people; nonetheless, through the depression they were living in opulence. The rich now are even more hateful as they don't even compensate with great aesthetics.