One beautiful warm Sunday, Matt and I took Abner and Bear for a stroll up the Hard Times trail up to the now closed Blue Ridge Parkway and walked back down to the Arboretum parking lot. On the way down we caught these two distant views of Biltmore House with some of our mountains looking pretty blue in the background. It does give you a pretty good idea of the "splendid isolation" George Vanderbilt obtained when he assembled his estate and built his house.