Road Trip: South - i95 trip
Day 8: Thursday, November 17, 2011 - Charleston, SC
Breakfast was non-existant, so we ate the bagels we bought at one of the stores in the city the previous night.
Today was ... wanna gues? Right! Another day of surprises (OK, it was just one again). For Linda (this is really getting repetitive, isn't it?).
Today a shuttle picked us up at the hotel - we had to check out before we left - to take us to the Magnolia Plantation. It was about a 20 minute bus ride.
The front - facing the river (they arrived by boat back then).
The back.
Magnolia trees of which the plantation was named for.
The grounds.
The Charleston River just off the property.
A pond. The platforms are for the aligators to sun themselves. Seriously.
A huge pergola.
Some live oaks.
We walked the garden and saw quite a few different flowers and trees. Couldn't hope to name them all either.
I couldn't hope to name any of them, as a matter of fact...
And took a tram ride around the grounds where we espied some more scenery. And aligators.
The garden path.
Slave quaters from back then.
Aligators. The platforms are put in the ponds FOR the aligators to sun themselves.
Turtles.
This was an area called the Biblical Garden
There was bamboo on the grounds.
Before entering the house, we walked around the back of the house some.
A bridge over the pond.
A statue on an island in the middle of the pond.
Linda and I in front of the pond (it was sunny).
The herb gardens - more ornamental now than back then.
Then we went into the house. No pictures were permitted inside and the law-abiding citizen that I am, I obliged.
After the platation tour it was back to the city for some lunch. We ate at a Mexican restaurant called Juanita Greenberg's. Yes, Greenberg. The food was decent, though Linda's sausage was a little over cooked. We had some local South Carolina hot sauce on it too that really provided some kick.
Before we met the shuttle at 3:00, Linda grabbed some coffee at a quaint little shop with a sofa. While she looked around, I took a cat nap (relatively, because our cat naps for an hour at a time, my nap was about 5 minutes).
The shuttle, with a narator, took us around for some sights.
Church and some steeples.
A building with a fountain in front.
The Charleston Post Office and Courthouse.
A campus.
A monument.
The homes of Charleston, though old, were nice to look at.
The suttle stopped in front of this submarine, The Civil War Submarine H. L. Hunley, and told us about it.
A zoom in on the sign in front of the submarine. It reads:
"Brought from Mobile, Alabama in August 1863 to help defeat the Union naval
blockade of Charleston, H.L. Hunley became the first submarine in history to sink
an enemy ship. Armed with a spar-mounted torpedo, it sank the Federal blockading
vessel, H(unreadable), the night of February 17, 1864. Although accomplishing its
objective, H.L. Hunley never returned to port.
Eluding searchers for more than a centruy, the submarine was considered perma-
nently lost. It was not, however, forgotten in Charleston. Recognizing the vessel's
pioneer place in modern undersea warfare, The Charleston Museum between 1967
and 1979 operated a branch "Hunley Museum," which featured this full-scale model.
Built according to the limited historical data available at the time, the museum's model differs in several details
from the original vessel, which was found in 1995 and raised on August 8, 2000. Owned by the United States
government, H.L.Hunley is under authority of the South Carolina Hunley Commission.
One stop was at the point overlooking Fort Sumpter.
The whole shuttle tour was about an hour and a half. Then the driver returned us to the hotel where we got into the car and headed out to dinner. We had 5 Guys for no particular reason, then headed toward Raleigh.
Though we had no intention of buying fireworks... we arrived at South of the Border about fifteen minutes after they closed. :-( Oh well, maybe next time.
We arrived at the Wingate in Raleigh, NC, and it was late - time for bed.