We recently celebrated our wedding anniversary and as we usually do during the time of our anniversary we take a pre-Memorial Day trip - somewhere. Last year we kept it simple and went down to St. Louis - mainly because I was getting back on my feet again from my off-on-off-on-again job situation. Since I was unemployed (but soon to be employed) in 2022, we stayed home. And in 2021 we took a trip to the Alabama Gulf Coast - our gold standard for the worst vacation we have ever experienced.
This year, I had enough Hilton points and - I thought - enough United points to take a trip somewhere nice. My wife and I had talked about going up to Montreal - she's always wanted to visit Montreal ever since I worked for a company up there starting over 20 years ago. She wanted to meet my former colleagues and hang out in the city. We even talked about going up to Quebec City which is even more European in nature than Montreal is. However, I figured wrong on United points and found out that I was going to be short. And by a lot. If we had used points and paid for the difference, it was still going to cost us about $800 bucks to get us up to Montreal. (I don't know why, but in my travel experiences to Montreal over the years, it's ALWAYS expensive to fly up there.)
Less than a week before we were supposed to go on vacation, we sat down and started to look up flights to places where we could use the points and - if we had to - a bit of out-of-pocket money to get there. We talked about going to Austin/San Antonio, and even back out to San Diego. Then I remembered from last year - we had talked about going to either Charleston, SC or to New Mexico for a late summer vacation. On a mental coin flip, we opted for New Mexico.
And we were lucky as the remnants of Hurricane Idalia - which hit the northwest coast of Florida and continued as a tropical storm up through Georgia and South Carolina - dumped heavy rain along the coast causing flooding in low-lying areas of Charleston and high winds which spawned tornadoes around the greater Charleston area caused significant damage. The city was effectively shut down for two to three days with many businesses and restaurants closed during that period.
A number of years ago, we had taken a trip to Savannah, GA and spent some time up on Hilton Head Island. We were going to head up to Charleston for a couple days, but we liked Savannah so much that we bagged our plans to go to Charleston and went back to Savannah to finish out our vacation. Since then, we had heard so many great things about Charleston - the history, the architecture, the restaurants - that we knew we had to get there at some point. This time, it all worked out.
Charleston turned out to be a wonderful city. Founded in 1670, the city has a French Quarter with beautiful colonial style houses and buildings along cobblestone streets. Stately buildings and churches are featured throughout the French Quarter with parks along the waterfront. One of their largest parks - The Battery - was partly closed down due to the rebuilding of the sea wall in the park. The walkway along the wall of the battery was also shut down to pedestrians who regularly walk the 2 mile route. The sea wall was damaged last year when water from the remnants of Hurricane Idalia rush over the wall flooding much of downtown Charleston.
The tallest structure in the French Quarter is St. Philip's Episcopal Church along Church Street. The street bends in front of the church to allow the structure to have three separate Tuscan-style porticoes facing three different directions along Church Street. The church was built from 1835 to 1838 and was the first Anglican church south of Virginia. St. Philip's was damaged during the Civil War, but restored in the 1870's.
Waterfront Park was a busy place the day we were. A cruise ship was docked at the port and a number of workers from the ship along with a number of sight-seers were hanging out. There were a couple three fountains in the park including the famous Pineapple fountain.
Wading and splashing in the fountains were encouraged, but signs around fountains warned that there were no lifeguards on duty and people were at their own risk wading in the fountains. They were "cover-your-ass" signs put up by the City of Charleston to guard against litigation, no matter how insipid it may be.
Across the bay from Waterfront Park was the USS Yorktown, the 10th aircraft carrier built for the Navy. The Yorktown (named after the original USS Yorktown which was sunk in 1942 during the Battle of Midway) was part of the fleet during World War II up through the Vietnam War before it was decommissioned in 1970. The Yorktown was part of the Naval & Maritime Museum at Patriots Point across the bay from Charleston in Mount Pleasant, SC. Off to the right in the bay was Fort Sumter, now a national historical park. Fort Sumter was the United States garrison that was first fired upon by Confederate forces on April 12, 1861 which started the Civil War.
Another part of the French Quarter in Charleston featured the City Market. The market was established in the 1790's, and the main building was built in the 1840's. Today, it encompasses four city blocks in the heart of Charleston. It is recognized as the oldest market of its kind in the U.S.
The City Market vendors set up each day and many booths are devoted to art and craftwork. We did see a number of booths that were selling Sweetgrass Baskets, a tradition that was started in Africa and was brought to America by slaves in the late 1700's into the early part of the 1800's. Bulrush grass that was once plentiful in the low country around Charleston down to Savannah, GA is the prime ingredient in the woven baskets that can fetch up to four figures depending upon the design and size. And that's one of the reasons why Sweetgrass Baskets have gone up in price over the years. Bulrush grass has been wiped out in some areas due to urbanization and land reclamation. My wife's father told us that he remembered traveling through the Charleston area some 60 years ago and seeing dozens of Sweetgrass Basket stands along roadways.
While in Charleston, we stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn - Charleston Waterfront. Before our arrival, Hilton upgraded us to a waterfront room that overlooked the Harborage at Ashley Marina thanks to my status as a Hilton Lifetime Diamond member. (On top of that, United upgraded us to first class on the flight from Chicago to Charleston - the first time my wife had flown first class!) The hotel was nice, it had free parking and a very accommodating staff. There was a rooftop bar that overlooked the marina and parts of the campus of the Medical University of South Carolina. It was a great place to relax after a long day of sightseeing in the area or a day at the beach.
Speaking of beaches, we visited five beaches during our time in South Carolina. The three beaches around the Charleston area - Folly Beach, Isle of Palms and Sullivan's Island - were all flat, hard-packed and great to walk in. (We tried to get to the beach at Kiawah Island, but we found out when we drove down there it was private and only open to residents and people staying on the island.)
Each day at the beach was warm and sunny with light winds coming off the ocean. We walked a minimum of 2.5 miles each time we went to a beach in the Charleston area. Each of them reminded us of the wide, flat and hard-packed sand beaches on Hilton Head Island when we went there a number of years ago.
As my wife and I seem to do when we go on vacation, we try to seek out microbreweries and brewpubs. On this trip we visited exactly ONE microbrewery and it was the Folly Beach tasting room of the Revelry Brewing Company based in Charleston. Located down a long hallway off the main road coming into downtown Folly Beach, the Revelry Brewing Company location there was just a small space with an open wooden framework ceiling for shading, but not for keeping the elements out. Even though we didn't visit any other brewpubs or microbreweries while we were there, many of the restaurants we went to featured craft beers made in the Eastern South Carolina area from the likes of Edmund's Oast, Seminar Brewing, COAST Brewing Company, and Low Tide Brewing Company. So, it was sort of like we went to microbreweries only with really good food.
While we really liked Charleston, we thought we'd like to venture out of the area for a couple days and either go up the coast toward Myrtle Beach, or down the coast back toward Hilton Head Island. We had figured out that Myrtle Beach was sort of a touristy area and we weren't too certain we wanted to head there. My wife and I were talking with the bartender on our first night at the Hilton Garden Inn and discussing other areas to go to. The bartender said that she didn't care for Myrtle Beach and all the traffic from the tourists.
A group of ladies were seated near us and one of them perked up when she heard us talking about Myrtle Beach. She said that she moved to Myrtle Beach thirteen years prior because she fell in love with the area over many of the visits she had taken there. But then she gave us this caveat - "You don't want to go to downtown Myrtle or to the beach areas. There's a couple places either north or south of the city that you'll want to visit."
Those places were North Myrtle Beach, near the North Carolina border; and the small town of Murrells Inlet about 10 miles south of Myrtle Beach. Over the next couple three days, we did some looking on-line at the Murrells Inlet area and decided to trek up there for a couple days.
Murrells Inlet is part of what is known as the Hammock Coast in South Carolina. It is known as the "Seafood Capital of the World" mainly because of the bounty of seafood the ocean pushes into the backwaters between the outer banks of the town and the inland marshes. Shrimp, oysters, clams, and seasonal fish - such as flounder, which seemed to be plentiful during our stay there - are pushed into the backwaters twice a day by the tides. Fishermen then harvest the seafood and sell to local restaurants and fish shops.
And because of the large amount of seafood available in the area, there are a number of restaurants in the area along the Murrells Inlet MarshWalk - a half-mile long wooden boardwalk that borders a saltwater estuary called Main Creek. The MarshWalk featured bars and restaurants with live music, some great views and a lot of seafood. Up and down Business Route 17, there were a number of restaurants ranging from seafood, Italian, wood-fired pizza and steaks.
And there were a couple beaches in the area that we were able to visit. The beaches in the Murrells Inlet area - Garden City Beach and Surfside Beach - weren't as nice as the beaches down near Charleston. Especially Garden City Beach. My wife fell into a sink hole along the beach at Garden City Beach and I fell in trying to help her out. It took another couple sitting nearby to help us get out. It was a pretty harrowing experience for my wife. She was pretty much done with Garden City Beach after that.
Just south of Murrells Beach is Brookgreen Gardens - a former 19th century rice plantation that now features gardens, ponds, sculptures, art museums, interpretive centers, and a zoo featuring natural habitats for native animals as well as an enclosed butterfly garden. During our research for the area leading up to going to Murrells Beach, my wife was reading up on Brookgreen Gardens and she said that we definitely had to set aside time to go out there.
Brookgreen Gardens stretches out over 9000 acres - about 15-and-a-half square miles - with walkways that take you to floral displays around elongated ponds, through a grove of centuries-old live oaks complete with Spanish moss hanging from the limbs, and along marshes where rice was grown by slaves in the early 19th century. There were area in the sun, areas in the shade, and there were museums with sculptures, paintings and other works of art where you could get into the air conditioning for awhile to beat the warm South Carolina day. According to my wife's pedometer on her phone, we walked over 3.5 miles around the grounds of Brookgreen Gardens. And we still didn't see all of it.
So, that was the Cliffs Notes version of our recent trip to South Carolina. We really enjoyed Charleston and felt very comfortable in the city. Driving around Charleston was a challenge and you could easily get lost if you don't have a GPS. And even with a GPS we still took some wrong turns resulting in some lengthy detours to get back to where we wanted to go. Other than a 24 hour period over the first couple days we were there when it rained off and on, the weather was great. Murrells Inlet was an interesting place as it bordered on the schlocky tourist attractions that we detest, but more than made up for it with some of the great restaurants we ate at while we were there. We rarely travel back to a spot that we've visited in the past during our vacations, but I would have no problem going back to Charleston at some point. For as long as it took for us to get there, I hope it isn't too long before we can get back.
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