Charleston

I do not understand how this site orders the pictures around, but they are in reverse chrono order. At the bottom is the picture from Savannah Georgia of the black soldiers who fought to save Savannah. Next up is a beautiful tree in one of the squares in Savannah. (The city is built entirely around those squares.) Next up is a pic of Bob and I in the back of the horse drawn carriage in which we toured Savannah. Then two pictures of Fort Sumpter - one from the ferry and one inside the fort.

It is over 60 miles from our campground to Charleston and it was a lovely ride on a pretty nice back road. The trees are still much smaller than the ones in Oregon, but they lined the road almost the whole way. The Charleston visitor center was packed. The parking lot was full and we had to park next door. The center did not really provide much information. They had automated displays which were a help only if you knew what you wanted. The major thing the center did was to sell tickets for tours. We noticed that there were a lot of families with children. We had thought that we were done with spring break, but obviously not. We have been dealing with spring break since mid March in Texas and it is spring break here this week. That is why everything is so busy and crowded. (We could not get reservations at any of the SC state campgrounds this week.) Hopefully we will be done with it this week.

Anyway, the lines were so long that we decided to skip the visitor center and just start walking with one of the maps. One of the things that both Bob and I wanted to see was Fort Sumpter. While we were walking we saw a sign that indicated the direction to go to Fort Sumpter. I already knew that we had to get on a ferry and that the ferry only left three times a day, so I thought that we should walk over there and see if we could get on the ferry. It was only about a mile and there were spaces on the next ferry at 2:30. We visited the museum - very well done and walked around Liberty Square. Then we took a 35 minute ferry ride - with lots of narrated history of the Charleston area. The fort itself was mostly original and a nice change from what we saw at the Alamo. There were nice graphics on how the fort was built in the middle of the harbor as well as on the history of that first shot in the Civil War (otherwise known here as the War Between the States).

We took the ferry back and got a recommendation for a good Italian restaurant. The restaurant was in the older historic part of town and they wanted to charge outrageous amounts of money for parking. But we found parking on the street and had a very nice dinner. Bob got very irritated at the whole idea of the parking charges, but calmed down. He really was very hungry so getting some food in him made a big difference. I thought about doing some shopping, but it was already getting late and we had to go back the 60 miles.

When I got back to the trailer I spent about 30 minutes on the phone with son-in-law trying to figure out why I cannot connect to the free wifi in this campground. We were not able to fix it. Maybe it is just this campground.

Tomorrow we leave here. I might have stayed longer visiting Charleston, but the long drive and the fact that this is not my favorite campground mean that we will move on. The problem is that we have no idea where to go or what to see next. There is nothing that is particularly calling me until we get into Virginia. So, we will probably just start driving and see what catches our attention.

Thanks to those of you who have commented on this blog. It is nice to know that you are reading it.