Carolina Highlights

Here are a few highlights from our trip to South Carolina with a little bit of North Carolina thrown in for fun! They are in no particular order because the blog is not cooperative. We may have to find a new blog site….

There were a lot of options for fried chicken. We determined that fried chicken is go-to food in the Carolinas. BoJangle’s is a fast food restaurant that we visited a couple times and noticed at many, many exits along the drive.

Rainbow Row in Charleston. There were lots of beautiful historic houses.

This is Sullivan’s Beach outside of Charleston. It looks cold and wind-swept in the picture but it was just wind-swept. There was plenty of heat to go around. We went back to a different beach the next day and had a more beachy experience.

We were both surprised at how wooded South Carolina was. Substitute pine trees for palm trees and we could have been in northern Minnesota.

From a restaurant in Columbia… yes, please…

Hiking at Congaree National Park. For some of the hike, there were these great raised walkways. For part of the hike, we were more in the forest. I was happy to not see any snakes.

We had some good beer on this trip. South Carolina is exploding with micro-breweries so a “beer flight” is the way to try little bits of several beers. This was in Greenville.

Beautiful downtown Greenville.

This hike started at an elevation of just under 1100 feet. We went up to this point in about 2 hours. It was a strenuous but not particularly dangerous hike.

The summit!

This is an overlook at/near the summit. Those young guys seemed to be awfully close to the edge. We chose to admire the view from here.

The “Sully Sullenberg” airplane that landed in the Hudson River a few years ago. This was the main attraction at the Aviation Museum of the Carolinas in Charlotte.

The Ravenel Bridge in Charleston. Our hotel was on one side of the bridge and “town” was on the other. There were strict instructions to “keep your eyes on the road” as we crossed. It is much higher than it looks here.

USS Yorktown in Charleston – a WWII aircraft carrier turned museum

From the flight deck of the USS Yorktown

We took a great tour of the nicely, air-conditioned state capitol building in Columbia.

Particularly in Columbia, there were lots of references to the Civil War (and a few somewhat uncomfortable Confederate relics). These are markers on the state capitol building to mark where Union bombs hit the building during the Civil War.

Don’t we look refreshed and not at all sweaty? That’s because you can drive to about 100 feet below this point – the highest peak east of the Mississippi River. It was also 20 degrees colder here than when we started up the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Beautiful views from the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a lovely drive!  More to come later….