BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY: HOLY CITY EDITION

SEPTEMBER 24, 2016

I wish there could be some kind of swashbuckling adventure story about how we got out of Charleston by the skin of our teeth, but alas, it is not to be.

No, we just got up super early, had breakfast in the Starbucks in the lobby of our hotel (because the call of pumpkin spice is strong, that's why) and we went back to the little airport to turn in our rental car.  Steve doesn't have to go through proper security lines anymore because he has some kind of pre-checked thing (grumblegrumblegrumble) so I got in line with the rest of the peasants and got frisked by the TSA.  This time my right ankle set off the body scan alert.  Seriously, I know I have thick ankles, but they aren't that bad!

There was a lady in line with me who had a really neat tattoo, though.  Around her thigh she had tattoo of a lace garter with an antique pistol stuck through it.  I mean, you don't see that everyday!

So after that, we went to one of the shops so that I could get a snow globe that wouldn't get confiscated, and we waited on our plane to leave.  Since our flight wasn't full, I ended up being able to move to a seat right next to an exit that had a lot of leg room!  I think Steve wanted it, but he was nice enough to let me use it.  Awwww.

We landed in Atlanta (have I mentioned how much I don't enjoy the Atlanta airport?) and our layover was long enough for us to have lunch and sit around for a while.  We ended up on a flight full of kids going to Sci-Vis Space Camp (which is the program for visually impaired children) but we didn't say anything to them.  At this point, I may not be the best ambassador for the place!  Haha!  Nah, I wouldn't have said anything to discourage them.  I'm not a monster, after all!  They were excited.  I ended up sitting next to a lady on the trip home that had an almost visible bubble of "DON"T TALK TO ME" around her.  I was ok with that.

Then we got home and that was that.  I already miss it.  Not the sweating, of course, but there is something about the place.  I can't really explain it. 

I think when I'm old, I'm going to move over to Charleston or Savannah... somewhere out there  Old people don't mind the heat so much.  I just need to find some people to go with me.

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY: HOLY CITY EDITION

SEPTEMBER 23, 2016

Today was the day that Steve didn't actually have to work!  Yay!

We got all our stuff together and headed out to our first destination.  We'd looked at a map and found a place called Sullivan's Island.  There wasn't a whole lot of stuff there, but we figured that we'd still take a look around.  It was a nice drive out there, and we finally got to drive out over the big bridge.  I don't particularly like driving over bridges like that.  I know that they are made by smart engineers and everything, but engineers can have bad days.  Eeeeeeesh.  Anyway, we drove through the lovely little town and wound up driving through what looked like a residential area.  We were going to go out to the beach, but we felt a little weird parking along people's houses to get to it, so we drove until we found a tiny little park with what looked to be a public beach.  It was really beautiful and tiny, and it was on the edge of everything, so we got out and walked a bit.  It wasn't a place where you could go swimming or anything.  There were signs that warned of a dangerous riptide, but it was a beautiful place to walk.  The sand was pearl gray and it sparkled!  I picked up some shells and looked around a bit.  We didn't stay for long, since it looked like it might rain, but we stayed long enough to see a wedding party come and take some pictures.  I loved it there.  How nice would it be to live in a place like that?

We left there and drove to the next place which was called Folly Beach.  Folly Beach is much more like the beach towns that I'm used to.  It wasn't as nice as Sullivan's Island, and it wasn't huge by any stretch of the imagination, but there were shops and restaurants, and there were hotels and beach houses all over the place.  We parked the car and walked around a bit.  We walked through the shops first, which I have to say, had some hilarious merchandise.  I love looking at the cheesy stuff that gets sold in tourist shops.  I don't buy it, but I love looking at it!  We got hungry while doing that, and we kind of stumbled across a very out-of-nowhere Irish Pub and we decided to stop and eat there.  It seemed oddly out of place, to be honest, and except for the size of the building, it was very much like the pubs we saw while we were in Dublin.  I thought that was kind of neat.

After lunch, we moved on to the city pier.  We walked up, and a very friendly man stopped us and told us all about the stuff we could see there.  I liked him immediately, and he seemed to love his job, so I mentally adopted him.  : )  Steve decided he didn't want to walk the entire length of the pier, so I left him at the tables, and I walked to the end.  It was really cool!  There were a lot of people fishing, and some guy had just caught the biggest fish I'd ever seen outside of an aquarium.  When he pulled it up, everyone came over to see it.  I don't know what kind it was, but it was so pretty that I kind of hate that he caught it!  It was gold and about four feet long!  I didn't stick around, though, because I wanted to go down to the beach before the rain started for real.

We walked down to the shore, and one thing I noticed was that the sand was half white and half black (which I thought was weird) and that instead of shells, the shoreline was covered in chunks of dead coral.  Huh.  We walked a bit and picked up some shells, but we could tell it was really about to rain and we didn't want to get soaked before getting back in the car.  I got to see the coast, at least!  I wonder why the sand is black.  I always though that had something to do with volcanoes.  Oh, well.  I got my shells and sand, and we went back to the hotel.

I had every intention of cleaning up and going back out, but once I got back to the hotel, I hit a wall and I hit it HARD.  I had gotten a shower (because of frickin' course I did. I've had a million showers since I've been here!!!!) and I had decided to reorganize my luggage to making packing easier, and I don't know if it was a blood sugar thing, or if all the walking and irregular sleeping and things just decided to pile up on me all at once, but I went down.  I didn't faint, exactly, but I had to lie down and not move for a bit.  My body just said "Nope."  I was pissed.  Here it was, my last night here, and I was lying in a hotel room and not doing anything!  However, sometimes you have to listen to your body, I guess.  I think it must have been a low blood sugar thing.  We finally decided to just forgo going anywhere else and just ordered room service again.  Heh, it was kind of funny, actually.  We didn't want much for dinner, so we both ordered grilled cheese sandwiches and fries off of the children's menu.  I don't know if room service people mind if adults order off of the kid's menu or not, but we didn't care and they didn't know we didn't have kids up here.  We had also found Star Wars: A New Hope playing on TV, so of course you know we were watching that.  It only occurred to me later how silly we must have looked to the waitress, to have been in our room, watching Star Wars and ordering grilled cheese sandwiches. :) At least we weren't wearing footie pajamas.  I mean, I didn't even bring mine!

I felt better after we ate and I finished the packing stuff I wanted to.  Now I'm sad that we're leaving tomorrow. I really love it here, even with the sweating.

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY: HOLY CITY EDITION

September 22, 2016

Happy first day of fall!  Not that it feels like fall. Eh, well hat was I expecting?  Heehee.

Steve didn't have to go into the office to work today, so we actually got to spend some time together this morning! We got breakfast and then sat around in the lobby of the hotel and chatted a bit. We finally parted ways so that he could do his homework and I headed back out to explore some more.

I realized last night that I didn't bring any clothes or shoes suitable for going to the beach, even if I was just going to walk around and not swim.  Greeeeeeeeat.  What was I thinking? I probably don't have to tell you that most of the cutesy boutique clothing shops around here don't cater to the bodaciously fluffy kind of woman that I am, even though I'm not exactly completely out of the "straight" sizes. I figured that it wouldn't be easy to find something to wear. Luckily, the very thing I complained about yesterday actually helped me. I walked to the GAP and got some shorts! Hooray for the GAP!

After that I just sort of wondered around for a while looking for some shenanigans to get involved in. I walked all the way to the visitors center and grabbed a tour bus. I really should have done that on my first day, but I got really excited about being able to walk everywhere I wanted to go. I'm not so excited about that now, so I paid to take a "General History" tour. The tour was ok, but I was disappointed that the driver didn't give us more specific history concerning things that happened around here. He did give us the history of the town itself, and about a couple of the houses, but I think he spent more time talking about the colleges here in the city. I was still glad to have taken the tour, because at least I know now that I went to most of the major things that I would have wanted to see. I missed a couple of the house museums, but that's fine. Maybe the only thing I won't get a chance to see is the French Quarter, but it is mostly restaurants, so unless I want to go from restaurant to restaurant and eat, which actually sounds like a pretty good idea now that I think of it, I am ok not going back! 

I actually left the tour bus before we got back to the visitor's center. His tour was technically over, and he gave us the option to get off and take a trolley back to wherever we were going. I got off because I wanted to look around the market one more time and then I could just walk back to the hotel.  Before I could look around too much, Steve texted me to let me know he was done with work, so I walked back and we ate together.  We had plans for later, so we came back to the hotel for a bit so I could clean up. 

I feel like this whole cleaning up thing has taken up way too much of my time here in Charleston.  I just really hate feeling sweaty unless I specifically want to be sweaty, you know?

We hung around the hotel until it was time for us to leave, and we walked back down past Market Street to meet our tour group.  We were going on a ghost tour!  Woot! I love, love, love going on ghost tours.  I really do think it's the best way to learn about a city.  I mean, sure, you have to listen to ghost stories, and mileage may vary on that depending on your feelings on the supernatural, but the tour guides usually have a real passion about the history of the city that your in, so you get a lot of the normal history along with the ghosties.  Our tour was pretty good, although like the bus tour, I thought there would be more to it.  Not that it wasn't fun and informative and all that, but I still thought there would me more stories.  We did learn that Edgar Allan Poe's legendary "Annabelle Lee" is allegedly buried in a kind of out-of-the-way graveyard just off of King St. so that was pretty cool.  The tour took us all over and lasted for about 2 hours.  By the time it was over, Steve and I were hot, sweaty, tired, and starving.  We had not eaten dinner before going on this thing, and I don't have any idea what we were thinking.  We felt too gross to go into a restaurant, so we went back to the hotel and got room service.

I love room service, even though it seems kind of hedonistic.  I don't know why it does, really, other than someone else cooks and brings you food that you can eat without wearing pants, but it was good!  We ended up staying up rather later than we had intended to, but it was a fun day.  I slept kind of hard.