Greer, SC
Opened 1962 as a regional partnership between Greenville and Spartanburg. BMW's only US manufacturing plant (since 1992) is in adjacent Greer, producing X-series SUVs for global export. The Upstate South Carolina manufacturing corridor.
The largest private residence in America — 178,926 square feet, 250 rooms — built by George Vanderbilt between 1889 and 1895. The French Renaissance château and its formal gardens are clearly visible from the air south of Asheville. The 8,000-acre estate includes farms, forests, and the Biltmore Winery. The sheer scale is difficult to comprehend until you see it from above and realize the building itself covers 4 acres.
The most-visited unit of the entire National Park System: 469 miles of motor road tracing the crest of the southern Appalachians from Shenandoah down to the Smokies, 252 of them in North Carolina. Begun as a Depression-era public-works project in 1935 and not fully finished until 1987 (the soaring Linn Cove Viaduct around Grandfather Mountain was the final piece), it was engineered for slowness — no commercial traffic, gentle grades, 45 mph, the views unfolding through 26 tunnels and hundreds of overlooks. Around Asheville it climbs past Craggy Gardens, where rhododendron blankets the balds, and on to Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi at 6,684 feet.
One of the wildest, most rugged places in the eastern United States — a 12-mile-long, 2,000-foot-deep chasm where the Linville River saws down through quartzite into the Pisgah National Forest. It's one of only a few federally designated wilderness areas in the East, so rugged it was never logged; the gorge walls are cliffs and crags (Table Rock, Hawksbill, the Chimneys) prized by climbers, and the terrain is steep enough that hikers regularly need rescue. At the head of the gorge, Linville Falls drops in tiered cascades about 90 feet into the canyon mouth. The surrounding Pisgah forest hides waterfalls in nearly every hollow.
At 5,946 feet, Grandfather Mountain is the highest peak on the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge — a craggy, rugged summit named for the profile of an old man's face that early settlers saw in its ridgeline. It's a UNESCO biosphere reserve with 16 distinct ecological zones stacked up its slopes. The famous draw is the Mile High Swinging Bridge: a 228-foot suspension footbridge built in 1952, spanning a chasm at exactly 5,280 feet of elevation, swaying over a thousand-foot drop. Just below, the Blue Ridge Parkway curves around the mountain on the Linn Cove Viaduct, an S-shaped elevated roadway hung off the slope — the last piece of the entire parkway to be completed, in 1987.