Today was the day of seeing as much of Charleston as possible in about 8 hours. Fortunately yesterday we had booked a horse drawn carriage ride and a Charleston Harbor boat tour. They were both really fun, really informative and quite tiring. Tiring because we did a bit of walking and the temperature was a bit higher and the air a bit muggier.
We grabbed our brown bag ‘to go’ breakfast bags for breakfast. Yum. We didn’t even meet up with Kim and Ilene to do that. They are always kind of interesting what you get in those bags. But it did feel the ‘hole’ for a few hours. At about 9:30 AM, we drove back into the same ‘Market Street’ area. The first item was finding a garage where we would not be gouged too bad. We found a public garage that charged a $1 every half hour with a max of $18. We ended up spending #17, So we were there for 8.5 hours touring the city. Last night, when we were in this area, the open air market was closed already. But this morning, wide open with lots of people walking through and looking at all the goods. We had some time to kill until our horse and carriage ride, so we too walked through the market. It is never anything I enjoy doing. But Ilene and Denise both purchased some fans knowing the day was going to be a bit sunny and warm...which it was.
At 11 AM, we boarded a carriage and set out to tour the downtown area of the city and its historical sites. Our guide was a gal who was really well informed, kind and had a great singing voice. At one point, she shared a black spiritual song...wish I could remember the name. But my golly, she had such a nice voice. We really enjoyed that. We saw lots of really old buildings....1600’s, 1700’s and 1800’s. We went down to the battery where cannons are still shown. We went to Rainbow Row where the multi story homes are painted in many colors. I guess this was an abandoned area a few hundred years ago...but then purchased and turned into brothels for a bit. They had an interesting past. The funny part was in front of the famous row of colorfully painted were two city, large, dumpsters. They really added to all the pictures that people wanted to take. For this reason, later in the afternoon, we walked all the way back there to see if we could get better pictures. Not sure we did though. The carriage ride was awesome. It is something that Denise and I had never done before through the city streets of a historical city like Charleston.
Once the carriage ride was over, we have about 1.5 hours to get to the Charleston Maritime Center to get on the boat for the harbor tour. It took us about 15 minutes to get there. Once we arrived, we realized we had 45 minutes before we start boarding and all were growing hungry so we set out to go find some food. We ended up walking another 15 minutes to East Bay Street Deli. We stopped a gal on the street and asked about food and she pointed us to this. It turned out to be a pretty good place for fresh sandwiches and salads. Once we got our food and inhaled it down, we quickly headed back to the Maritime Center just in time to get in line and immediately board the boat. The harbor cruise was about 1.5 hours long with the captain giving great details about the going on in the harbor over time and currently. I’m always amazed at the homes that sit on the shores of the islands and the mainland. I guess it is a fantasy that most can only have to have such a place to come to. They look so beautiful, appealing and fun looking. One thing of interest is that yesterday, they opened up a new shipping yard. This yard can accommodate the largest shipping vessels, ones that can carry 12,000 shipping containers. 12,000!!! That is crazy. How those boats stay afloat.
After the boat ride, we decide to walk back to the Rainbow Row of houses to try and get better pictures. It was about a mile walk...not too bad. We tried to get better pictures....not sure that we did. While there, Travis began his defense of his Master Degree paper. Denise tuned in to listen to Travis speak in statistical gibberish. Fortunately, his advisors and professors approved his work. So he his now a full accredited Master Degree recipient. Proud of him. Lots of hard work. I hope it helps his career over the years to come. This defense took a while. So about half way through, we began walking to the restaurant that we wanted to eat at for dinner. It is called Hyman’s Seafood and appears to be one of the favorites in the downtown area. The food turned out to be very good. But the portions were smaller than what we’ve been having with the prices being up there a bit due to being downtown. All and all, a great experience. One note...looking at our waitress...I thought we were at Hooters. She was pretty scantily dressed with a low cut tank top and really short shorts. We just scratched our heads and wondered why she got away with this.
Since dinner did not fill us like we thought it would, we knew the Ice Cream shop to fix that. So off we went to the same Ice Cream shop we went to yesterday. It was just as good as last night.
I am now writing this in our room. We had decided that our best stand by hope to get home tomorrow was the flight at 7 AM. We had asked Kim if he would get up to take us to the airport around 5:30 AM. He said he would. But that caused Kim and Ilene to wonder if they could switch their 4 PM flight to that one. Well, they never had time to pursue it. But while we were walking around, they got a text from United saying that their flight was really full and if they wanted to switch to another flight. So they did! So we are all going to be on the same flight headed home early tomorrow. And, thank you Kim, for agreeing to take us even though that is now not needed. We will be going together...yay!
Trip is almost over. It will be a memorable one. We covered the South Carolina coast and history pretty good. It is a great place to visit. Our beautiful earth has so many great places to see and visit and some are right here in our own backyard in the USA!
Some pictures:
I can’t remember the name of this iconic bridge, but it is a beautiful bridge. We went under it and sounded the horn and it echoed for a good 5 seconds after the horn quit. Pretty cool.
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