The Great Road Trip Day 5 - Charleston, SC

We got to sleep in this morning...something we all needed. Our average bedtime during this trip has been midnight (not terribly late, but late enough when all your days are action-packed), so we enjoyed the sleep. John was up the earliest because he needed to take his car in to get some routine maintenance done to ensure it would be ready for the trip down to Charleston and back. I woke up before Minh and Nick and did some blog-updating. Finally when the guys got up around 8:30ish, I started making some breakfast. John had hooked us up with eggs, sausage, bagels and jelly, so I started scrambling eggs and baking sausages. John was not a fan of eggs, so I knew we'd have to make all 12 of them, as well as all the sausage. Needless to say, there was a lot of breakfast left over after we were done! It was more than enough to get us started for the day.

After getting cleaned up and packed up, we hit the road for Charleston. Minh and Nick led the way and John and I followed. We had a great time talking and catching up about everything that had been going on in each others lives. We talked about the various drama we each had been in and the drama we currently were involved in, and found it funny that we both seemed to be living in soap operas (and I try to live a relatively drama-free life!).



We finally got to downtown Charleston, parked the cars and started walking to take in the sights. We walked down Meeting Street, which had lots of cool little shops. After a few blocks, we came to something that was of major interest to me...a firehouse! I was reminded of how in 2007, nine firefighters from Charleston died in a huge warehouse fire. It rocked the firefighter community to the core, especially the city of Charleston. Around that particular firehouse, they had a monument erected that honored all of the Charleston firefighters that had ever lost their lives in the line of duty. Fortunately it was not a very long list, but it was very sad to see those nine names listed with the same date by each one. May they rest in peace.


One really cool and unexpected thing I saw while visiting that firehouse was the old fire chief from Montgomery County, Tom Carr! He had retired from Montgomery County and moved down to Charleston to become the fire chief down here. He was born and raised in Charleston and had apparently always had plans to come back here to retire. I struck up a conversation with him and we chatted about the job briefly. Another firefighter who was there with him named Ray gave me a quick tour of the bottom level of the firehouse which housed some old (VERY old) fire trucks. He told me all about them and how one of them was pulled by horses! Very cool stuff indeed.


After leaving the firehouse, we came to The Marketplace, a strip of unique and open-air markets that downtown Charleston is famous for. We checked out all of the crazy stores and looked at all of the vendors selling pretty much anything you could think of: flags of almost any country you could think of, baskets weaved right in front of your eyes, ceramic frogs that you could make "croak," virtually anything! It was definitely a tourist trap, but they did have lots of cool things. When we reached the end of the market, we decided to eat at one of the restaurants recommended yesterday by Tiffany and Brian: A.W. Shucks. We were going to eat at Bubba Gump's Shrimphouse, but we favored the unique Charleston restaurant over the chain. And boy, were we glad we made that decision. The food at A.W. Shucks was AMAZING! I will definitely come back there if I'm ever in Charleston again.


After finishing our food, we continued on down Meeting Street. We came to a historic building that housed an old dungeon where pirates were kept a couple hundred years ago. We signed up to take the tour of the dungeon, and it was all pretty cool. While coming down to Charleston, John told me that South Carolina was known for having lots of crime. Maybe if they reopened that dungeon, that reputation might change...


Once the tour was done, we walked a couple more blocks back to Meeting Street and said farewell to John (he had to get back so he could get ready to teach tomorrow). Once we finished saying our goodbyes, we continued down Meeting all the way to the end, where we saw some ridiculous mansions. We're talking mansions that not only were big, but intricately designed to look colonial and historic. There were at least three people who looked like professional photographers taking pictures of these various houses. And I couldn't blame them one bit for doing so.


Meeting Street ended at a boardwalk bordering a body of water. After chilling by the water for a bit, we hopped on a trolley-bus and headed back to our car. We had tried getting in touch with some people from our church's Charleston branch to hook us up with a place to stay, but it was simply too short notice. Once couple was actually able to host us, but they had a cat! Darn cat allergies!! We ended up heading out of town and finding a hotel about an hour outside of Charleston. At the hotel, we settled in, grabbed a pizza for dinner, and finished the day by watching more episodes of "The Office" and "Battlestar Galactica." Tomorrow...Savannah!