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Day 170 – The Biltmore Spoon

There’s a reason the Biltmore House near Asheville, North Carolina is dubbed “America’s Largest Home®” (and yes, that is actually a registered trademark of the Biltmore company).


Constructed by George Washington Vanderbilt II between 1889 and 1896, the Biltmore House sits on the 10.86 square mile Biltmore Estate. It has 135,280 square feet of living area and because it is still owned by Vanserbilt’s descendants, that makes it the largest privately owned house in the United States.

Descendants of Vanderbilt include noted eye-roller and CNN news anchor, Anderson Cooper and star of TV’s Deadwood and Justified, Timothy Olyphant. 

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Day 169 – The Kennedy Space Center Spoon

On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space as a crew member aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on a mission which lasted 6 days, 2 hours, 23 minutes, 59 seconds.


Unlike the Kennedy Space Center Shovel, this souvenir of KSC is actually shaped like a spoon and was probably made around the time of Ride’s Challenger mission. The spoon is much, much smaller than the actual space shuttle. Science!

 

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Day 168 – The San Diego Zoo Spoon

I’m finishing off a week of zoo spoons with yet another zoo I’ve never been to: The San Diego Zoo. 

In 1999, a female giant panda named Hua Mei was born at the zoo. In 2004, she became the first giant panda cub to survive to adulthood in the United States. She was promptly shipped off to China, where she has since had 10 babies, including 3 sets of twins.