Madeline, Frances, Henry and I recently took a trip to Charleston, South Carolina. We had a wonderful time, plus the weather was gorgeous! We did have some issues with my car and Frances running a fever. But we managed to work through these problems. Here is the rundown:
We arrived in the Charleston area in the early afternoon on Saturday, March 10th.
We went straight to Sullivans Island to visit Fort Moultrie before it closed at 5 PM. After watching a short, but funny ( mostly due to the subtitles for the hearing impaired) film on the history of the fort, we walked the grounds and buildings of the fort. You could see how close Fort Sumter was while standing on the ramparts, imagining the Confederates bombing the US Troops 151 years ago. Fun fact: Edgar Allen Poe was stationed here in 1827. After touring the Fort we headed to the adjacent beach on Sullivans Island. The beach is broad and flat and the sand is packed enough to ride a bike on. There are houses along the beach, but they are fairly far back and concealed with a small dune covered with grass. The lighthouse is the most hideous thing we have ever seen. It is triangular and covered with faded and peeling siding - UGH! The wind was up but we weren’t pelted by blowing sand. We found some shells, lots of sand dollar pieces, and several big jellyfish. Finally we headed to our hotel in Mt. Pleasant to check in and then get some dinner.
Sunday morning, I took a taxi to downtown Charleston to pick up a rental car. (My Escape was having clutch issues.) I picked M,F,H at the hotel and we headed to the Caw Caw Interpretative Center in Ravenel across the Cooper and Ashley Rivers. Caw Caw is a county park (admission $1 per person) located on an old plantation site. There are lots of trails through virgin forest, cypress swamp and old rice fields. We stopped at the visitor center to pay our fees and get a map. The visitor center had a nice model of a rice field that you could manually flood and drain.
We walked through forest disturbing lots of squirrels and lizards. There was boardwalk through the cypress swamp. Mads had worn her cowboy boots so any wildlife was forwarned about our approach much to Henry’s chagrin. Finally we reached the rice fields. We were on an elevated walkway (berm) between the rice paddies. It was humbling to think about the slaves that had worked those fields six days a week from sun-up to sun-down some as young as Frances.
We took lots of pictures then headed down the berm. Henry ran ahead as usual and then turned back screaming. He had almost stepped on a 3 foot gator that was sunning itself on the berm we were walking on! We quickly skirted around this little gator and continued on. Then we saw the monster - a 13 foot, super, fat gator sunning on the side of one of the irrigation ditches. This thing was enormous! More pictures...
Then we headed back toward the visitor center to enjoy our packed lunch.
After lunch, we headed back to Charleston to see the Hunley Museum. The Hunley was a Confederate submarine that was the first sub to sink a ship during combat. The Hunley mysteriously sank in February 1864 after sucessfully sinking the USS Housatonic. The sub was lost for over 130 years. In 1980 the sub was raised from the bottom of Charleston Harbor. The remains of all 8 crew members along with other textiles, artifacts and personal belongs were still in the sub. The museum is in a warehouse along the Cooper River. Exhibits include facial reconstructions of the crew members, displays of artifacts and models of the sub. The Hunley itself is submerged in a large tank of freshwater. After climbing a scaffold you can look down on the Hunley and see how tight the quarters were. The sailors all died from asphyxiation not drowning. They had a candle that would go out when the air was running out, so they knew they would have to surface within minutes. The candle was recovered from the wreck. Imagine being in that confined space knowing that you were almost out of air! Quite sobering.
Next we headed to Magnolia Cemetery where the Hunley crew is interred along with many Civil War veterans. This cemetery is huge and many of the markers are elaborate. Family plots have intricate wrought iron fences or crypts. The trees have Spanish moss draped over the branches creating a very old South, creepy feeling. Next, it was back to the hotel for a snack and recharge.
Once we were refreshed we parked at the foot of the Arthur Ravenel Bridge over the Cooper River and walked to the middle - almost 1 mile!. The bridge offers spectacular views of Charleston, Patriot’s Point and Fort Sumter off in Charleston Harbor. Dinner was delicious tacos at Taco Mamacita’s on Sullivan’s Island. Finally we headed to Shem Creek - the most photographed scene in SC. The sun was headed toward setting so the shrimp boats looked very quaint.
Monday morning, we took my car to a service station first thing - 730 AM! Then after breakfast at the hotel we headed to downtown Charleston. We found free parking on the Battery which is the tip of Charleston and starting a walking tour of the city. The houses on the Battery are GRAND! We saw society ladies sipping tea on the verandas while sitting in wicker furniture with ceiling fans keeping the bugs away. Spring had arrived in Charleston and the flowers are beautiful and the air is perfumed with the scents. Mads and Frances stopped to visit the Old Slave Mart Museum while Henry and I headed to Waterfront Park to see the fountains and view a large cruise ship.
Once we reunited, we walked past Rainbow Row, a favorite of mine. We wanted to get on the noon boat to Fort Sumter so we quickly hoofed it to the departure point and were some of the last passengers to board. We had to sit on the floor in the bow but it was a warm day and the view was nice. The ride out to Sumter is about 40 minutes, you have about 1 hour at the Fort before heading back. Henry was impressed with the canons and how they could be turned on tracks. The museum at the fort was really impressive with lots of photos of the destruction during the Civil War. By the time we arrived back in Charleston, we were starving! Quick lunch at Subway then more sightseeing in the city. We stopped by several churches including St. Michael’s which has beautiful stained glass windows, a dome over the alter and lots of angels and doves. Henry was exhausted and heading toward the point of no return - so we returned to the car and headed back to Mt Pleasant.
Since we had some time to kill before dinner we headed back to Sullivans Island and the beach. Mads and Frances took photos of each other for what seemed like hours, while Henry played in the sand. Henry built a model of Fort Sumter out of sand and shells and rocks including cannons and ramparts. I walked along the beach while noseeums invaded my scalp. We got the rental car all sandy when we piled back in. Atlanta Bread was our destination for dinner. It just like Panera. We got the food take-out and ate in our hotel.
Each night, Mads and Frances would head to the lobby/breakfast area to play Nancy Drew (a computer mystery game) while I got Henry to sleep. This system worked very well.
My car would be done around 9:00 AM on Tuesday morning. So first thing after breakfast, we went to pick it up. Mads was very nervous driving the rental. She can’t drive my car because it has a manual transmission. Technically she shouldn’t be driving the rental because she is only 19. Well after we picked up my car, we had to drive into downtown Charleston to return the rental. We parked a block away so I would be the one driving it into the lot.
We had left Frances and Henry at the hotel eating breakfast. We picked them up and headed to Boone Hall Plantation in Mt. Pleasant. This place was cool! After paying admission at the gate, you drive through some woods then arrive at the Avenue of the Oaks.This is the driveway leading up to the plantation house that is lined on both side with majestic live oaks draped in Spanish moss. Beyond the oaks on one side is pasture with horses, on the other side are 9 original slave cabins. We headed to the slave cabins first. each cabin told about a different aspect of the slaves’ lives - worship, family life, work, crafts, etc. The last slave cabin has a theater beside it where a woman tells about the Gullahs. She was fascinating. She spoke the Gullah language, talked about slavery, and how the Gullah culture developed and almost disappeared. We also checked out the gardens, smokehouse and cotton dock warehouse. Next we went for a tour of the house. The house is not original to the plantation but is historically correct for the 1800’s.
This house and plantation were used in the miniseries North & South, and more recently in The Notebook. We were forbidden to take photos inside. It was surprisingly smaller inside then I thought it would be, but still very grand. After the house tour and a quick picnic lunch we took a carriage ride around the property. Our driver was very entertaining and informative. The early owners grew indigo until the market collapsed after the American Revolution, when the turned to cotton.
They also used clay from the creekside to make bricks. The thriving brickyard made many of the bricks used in the historic houses in Charleston as well as 40 to 60 % of the bricks used to build Fort Sumter. After the Civil War, cotton was no longer king, so they planted pecan trees and did much better than many other land owners at the time. The plantation has been reduced in acreage to just 736 acres today. Besides the Boone Hall and the gardens and slave cabins, the land is farmed with a variety of crops. We saw pecan trees, cotton, strawberries, blueberries, cantaloupe, gourds, pumpkins and peach trees. Apparently there are also lots of snakes hiding in basements, wine cellars, sheds, etc. By now it was early afternoon. We stopped at the hotel briefly to grab a snack, use the bathroom. Back in Charleston, I dropped off Mads and Frances to shop and look around some more. Henry and I headed back over the Cooper River to Patriots Point Naval and Maritime Museum. Here they had a Vietnam Support Base which is a true to scale exhibit showing the living conditions for the troops in Vietnam - very depressing. So we headed over to tour the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown which played a role in the Pacific theater from 1943 to the defeat of Japan in 1945. She also served in Vietnam in the 1960’s and in 1968 recovered the Apollo 8 astronauts. We arrived rather late in the afternoon and the Yorktown was desserted. There were 4 self-guided tours that took us deep into the bowels of the vessel. I felt like a mouse in a maze trying to find the cheese. Henry loved it. We saw the officers and enlisted men’s quarters, the infirmary, chapel, Engine rooms, torpedo rooms. The huge deck below the flight deck was filled with various aircraft with folding wings. Henry got to sit in the pilot's seat of a Cougar jet fighter. The flight deck also had aircraft situated on it which you could touch and inspect. Then we headed up to the bridge and sat in the captain’s chair looking out on the flight deck. Only one scary part. We were down deep into the enlisted men’s area when a fire alarm started to sound. Henry freaked out because there were no EXIT signs, we just had to follow the white arrows on the floor that indicated our tour route. It took us about 5 minutes to get back to the flight deck and we had to climb about 5 ladders. The alarm was not going off anywhere else on the ship. But by then Henry was ready to leave. Back over the bridge into Charleston, we met up with Frances and Mads who had had fun shopping.
After a quick fast food dinner, we headed back to the hotel to relax, play Nancy Drew and rest.
We headed for home on Wednesday leaving around 9:30 AM. The drive home was long since we did it all in one day. Traffic around DC was nasty. We arrived home by 8:30 PM - 11 hours isn't too bad! Back to school and work on Thursday - boo hoo!
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