Asheville, NC

This weekend we started our trip down to New Orleans. Our first stop was Asheville, North Carolina. We met up there with Abu, Alex and our nieces Isabel and Natalia. We visited the Biltmore Estate and went rafting down the river. It was a blast. At first we were only going to stay two nights, but we were having so much fun that we all decided to stay one more night.

We stayed at the campground at Lake Powhatan. It was a beautiful campground, and the kids had fun swimming on the lake. We were only allowed to run the generator until 7pm, so after that, we had to come up with some creative ways of entertaining the kids. The first night we made a fire, cooked smores, and put up the small tent for the kids to play in. Alex took out Carlos' guitar, and we even had a sing along under the stars. This was the first time the girls had ever been at a campfire and had smores. They loved them! Gabi and Natalia went in the tent and told spooky stories with a flashlight. And Migue was running all around the camp site. Good thing his tennis shoes have lights, so we could always know where he was (it was quite dark outside).
The next day, after a late start we headed to the Biltmore Estate. It is hard to describe the beauty and magnitude of the house and surrounding gardens. Gabi loved the bowling alley; Abu loved the kitchen (which was composed of several room; including a number of walk-in refrigerators, huge pantries, and a pastry kitchen); Natalia liked the indoor swimming pool and Alex and I loved the library. We went up and down many staircases and walked and walked and walked some more. We were all pretty tired by the time we were done, so we headed back to the RV to cook up some burgers on the grill and go to bed early. We would need our rest for our rafting trip down the river the next morning.
On Saturday morning we had our river trip scheduled for 10:30am. We arrived early and got all suited up in our life vests, got on the bus to the river and got on our two rafts. This was the highlight of the weekend. We had so much fun, that it is hard to describe with words. I will let the pictures show you what we did.