Southern BBQ, Sweet Tea & George Washington Sat Here

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Here we are in Charleston South Carolina. We feel like we’re truly in the south now. It’s amazing the differences we see after traveling only a couple of hundred miles south. Almost like we crossed over some invisible border into another country. The speech is very different (we hear the southern drawl from most of the locals), attitude is different, the temperature & humidity went up 20 degrees and the land is totally different. Our campground is a real slice of the south and located in a swamp area. I know you are probably saying “euuhh… they are staying in a swamp????” but it’s not bad. All the trees have the Spanish moss hanging from them and we expect to see an alligator any minute (so far no luck, is that good or bad?) We did see a spider that had spun its web completely across the road (about 15 feet) and the spider was about the size of your fist. Thank goodness the web and spider were in the trees about 20 feet above our heads.

We had some entertainment on the drive into the area. Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg are both nearby and we were able to view some army rangers doing some parachute training.
2 things Charleston has a lot of is history and walking tours to help show that history off to tourists (that’s us) so we went walking. I had done research on the internet for each of the areas we have visited and searched out the best things to do. This walking tour called “Charleston Strolls” was very well recommended by magazines and travel TV shows so we made the reservation. Saturday morning we drove into Charleston to meet up with our tour. Our tour guide was named Butler (yes, that’s her first name) who was born and raised in the area, she is a stay at home mom who conducts area tours as something to get her out of the house occasionally. We never did find out what her husband does though she did tell his he belonged to a couple of the socially prominent gentlemen’s’ clubs (no women allowed as members) in the city. Butler had to make 3 stops at downtown hotels to pick up anyone else who might want to go on the tour. We were picked up at the 2nd stop, then on to the 3rd hotel. It turned out we were the only people wanting a walking tour that day so we had Butler as our own personal tour guide! All for $13 each! Good deal if you ask me. This happened to us once before during a nighttime walking tour in London (we have good luck I guess). Butler walked us around and across the historic area of Charleston pointing out important architecture and telling us about important people in Charleston history. We also visited a church that had been there since the 1700s and she took us to the pew where George Washington sat when he attended services while visiting Charleston as President of the United States. We also saw one the slave auction market, which is currently being made into an African American museum. The many houses we saw were beautiful and also very pricey. An old house (most of them date in the 1800s) near the waterfront will cost over a million dollars and the yearly property taxes alone are between 20 & 40 thousand.
After the tour we lunched at a BBQ place where your napkins are really hand towels. I had a small rack of BBQ ribs (um um good). Sunday we visited one of the more famous plantations in the area called “Boone Hall”. It is has been in quite a few movies, they shot some of the exterior Tara scenes there from the movie “Gone With The Wind” and filmed most of the movie “North & South” at the plantation.

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Photos

Southern spider
This spider was bigger than my hand and had spun it's web in between 2 trees.