Biltmore Girls Trip

A couple months before school ended a group of friends from church all decided that we needed a girls weekend. We all followed this instagramer named Ralphie Jacobs, she speaks about parenting and has workshops all over the country.  We found one about 7 hours away in North Carolina.

We left around 6:30 am on a Friday, the drive was beautiful, green rolling hills, on winding roads. We talked the whole time, conversations about everything. 

 We had time to check into our hotel and drop off our stuff before heading to the workshop at 4:00.  

The woman has become somewhat of a celebrity, we all follow her on instagram and we were all excited to hear from her. It was at a reception hall, with about 30 tables that was nicely decorated.  At each place setting was a workbook, pen and note card with the phrase “stay safe” , the workshop was 5 hours long with a 45 minute catered dinner break and about 3 other 5-10 minute breaks in between.  Her main focus is positive parenting, our job is to teach, model and praise, those three things go hand in hand. I would say that about 60% of her examples were meant for toddler age, but they could easily be applied to older children and teens. Afterwards, Kelsey in our group really wanted to meet the woman doing the workshop (Ralphie) and take a picture with her. That evening we talked about the concepts we learned and which ones we wanted to use in our home. 

We got tickets to tour the estate of the Vanderbilt family called Biltmore, it was 2 hours back towards home. 5 women getting ready at the same time with one bathroom, and two mirrors was kind of tricky! I think I took the least amount of time to get ready, I also didn’t get distracted with talking. We were able to all make it to the hotel breakfast and leave on time. Biltmore was absolutely breathtaking. I felt like I was walking through Downton Abbey. It was built in 1895, but the owners renovated parts as time went on and left some parts original. We didn't spend the extra money on the audio tour but we did get a large pamphlet that explained each of the rooms.  The library was my favorite, the fireplace was gigantic, floor to ceiling with old books, I wanted to jump over the barrier rope and take a book off the shelf so bad! It had an indoor pool that was not filled that gave us all a creepy vibe. It took us about 1 ½ hours to walk through the parts of the house that were open. After the house we walked the gardens and greenhouse. About a 5 minute drive away they had some shops we walked through. We came back to the hotel and relaxed, we were exhausted from walking around in the heat all day. We found a Thai restaurant near by which was really good, and then we walked to an outlet mall and shopped until it closed at 9:00.

We found a ward about 30 minutes on the route back home, so we stopped and attended their sacrament meeting. It was the smallest little ward we have ever seen. It was fast and testimony meeting and the people were so sincere, humble, and genuine. We got home around 6 pm Scott and the boys were waiting for me on the porch. The house was clean, the kids were happy, all was well while I was gone.