Saturday, January 28, 2012

Escape: Twilight Walk

We started our adventuring in Charleston with a late afternoon walk that soon morphed into a twilight walk that soon morphed into a walk in the dark. 

Our posh Charleston hotel was only 1 block up from St. Michael’s Episcopal Church with one of the most beautiful church steeples I’ve ever seen.  Day or night, the thing was worth taking pictures of! 

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We noticed how close together many of the historic houses were, and consoled ourselves with the the thought that even the closest houses in Oregon aren’t that close.

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We turned a corner and this is what we saw. 

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A beautiful fountain against the night sky—just begging me to take pictures of it!  After I was done taking pictures we walked farther into Waterfront Park.  We could see the Yorktown battleship across the Cooper River. 

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I loved being able to look at the beautiful Cooper River bridge.

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I had to take a few more pictures of the fountain from other angles. 

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And then I noticed this most awesome sign.  Seriously the best sign I think I’ve ever seen…you have to at least read the first half…

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As we continued on our walk we passed the US Customs House. 
We don’t know what they do there, but what a beautiful building they do it in!

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I had made a resolution to branch out and eat new things at new places on this trip. 
We decided to have dinner at this fine establishment.

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I am not a huge fan of Carolina vinegar based barbeque, but I was a total fan of everything this place had to offer.  It was finger-licking good, they gave us free peach cobbler (the good old fashioned kind) and Russ had to practically roll me back to the hotel. 

We took a short detour on our way back to the hotel.  We had been talking to one of the many tour salespeople, and he told us about the Old City Jail.  Apparently it had just been featured (maybe on the history channel?) as one of the “most terrible” jails in the United States.  Over a period of about a hundred and fifty years (ending in the early 1900’s) over 14,000 people were executed there!  He was sure that if we walked by we’d see something scary.  So of course I wanted to give it a try.

We didn’t see anything scary, but knowing just that bit of the history of the jail definitely made it creepy.  Sadly none of the pictures I tried to take turned out.  It was really foggy, and there was so much water vapor in the air that if the flash went off that was all you saw.

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I did think this sign was interesting…One of America’s Treasures, huh?!?

1 comment:

  1. Just the sight of that pineapple fountain raises my blood pressure...

    One time I was there with the boys- they were playing happily and I'm not sure what I was doing, but I wasn't vigilantly supervising them like the sign said to do, bc I looked up to find that Brigham's head was stuck underneath the stream of water where one of those big arcs comes down. The stream of water was so powerful it was literally holding his head down and he couldn't breathe! He got it free right before I got to him, but it still haunts me every time we go down there.

    So I think they should add to the sign: "You should not stick your 3-yr-old head under the giant streams of water."

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