Sound Bites & Snap Shots

It is true that books can take you to new places and that’s just what happened as a result of Mason reading The Mystery of the Biltmore House by Carole Marsh.  He was so enthusiastic about the book and expressed a strong desire to go visit.  Spring break and a long weekend were just the ticket to solving the mystery of its appeal for ourselves.

So after Walker served 7 AM Mass, we loaded up and headed out to Ashville, North Carolina for the weekend.  Ashville is about six hours from us so we planned to break up the drive with a few stops.  Our first was for lunch at Cracker Barrel in Tennessee.  On a whim, we checked our geocaching app and discovered there was a cache right at the restaurant. 

It was a great find, keenly hidden and clever disguised.  We must have looked like a bunch of klutzes because we kept “dropping” our keys to look under the benches where we suspected the cache was hidden.  We were delighted to finally put our hands on it.  From there we continued the drive to Knoxville. 

There we tried to locate a few caches before dinner. Carefully hidden was one in this tree.

It’s still not very obvious even with a zoom lens but it didn’t elude us. 

We intentionally timed our dinner for Knoxville so we could eat at Pizza Palace, another one of the restaurants highlighted on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.  Imagine a place with drive-up service like Sonic but with cooked-to-order Italian food.  We had no idea that we would sit in our parked car for almost an hour waiting for our food but it was worth it.  They are known for their pizza, onion rings and spaghetti with meat sauce.  We got to try two of the three and will gladly return on a non-Lent Friday to sample the sauce. 

After dinner we completed the drive to Asheville, checked into our hotel and turned in quickly for the night.  Tomorrow is our big day at the Biltmore House and we want to be rested.