Once we had driven for a little bit, we were back in the historic part of Charleston. As explained in the last post, this is one of Zack’s favorite areas thus far on the trip, so we put a couple of hours of parking into the meter (finally found a spot today) and explored around town a little. As we looked around, we saw quite a few elaborate churches, some with towering spires. We later discovered that some famous people were buried at these churches, including a few politicians like John Calhoun.
Throughout the town, there were a lot of different historical sites (be it houses or memorials with signs posted out to teach us an interesting part of history).
After a while, our parking was beginning to run out, so we walking back that direction. Because we hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, we stopped briefly at a Dunkin Donuts, then made our way back to the car. Along the walk, Zack and I attempted to play an impromptu game. It involved creating a conversation only movie titles. It was a lot harder then expected, but we still had fun creating our elaborate, not very coherent story.
We made it back to the car with three minutes of parking to spare, and began driving once again. We soon found a parking lot near a very large battleship museum. It would’ve cost us a bit to park in that lot though, so we drove around a little longer and found a soccer field nearby. While walking from the car, we found a memorial for lost submariners, with a life-size submarine display. We looked at that for a while, then travelled the last little bit towards the battleship.
When we got to the ticket booth, we realized that we could either go on the battleship (for a fairly expensive price) or take a ferry to Fort Sumter and tour the fort (for a lesser price). Because of this, we thought it would be fun to go see where the first shots of the civil war were fired, and bought tickets. The next ferry wasn’t leaving for about an hour, so we decided to do some more of our favorite activity this trip—exploring.
Before looking elsewhere, we took a short trip to see if the gift shop had anything interesting.
Off to the side of the docks, one of the first things we saw was a miniature C plane. Walking over, some air force soldiers informed us that we could climb inside, so we did.
While there wasn’t a full size C plane next to it, here’s a picture for comparison.
After that, we decided to walk a little further down and sit on the edge of a small hill overlooking the inlet and some marshes. While there, we listened and heard a chorus of dozens of different birds, each happily singing away. Around 1:10, we noticed that the tour boat was boarding, so away we went.
Aboard the ferry, we sat down in the chairs provided. Shortly after we started moving, Zack and I moved up to the front deck to watch the ocean/inlet as we rode towards Fort Sumter.
On the journey, we listened to the loudspeakers as it gave us some information about the Fort and surrounding areas. Along with the many sea birds flying around, we spotted some dolphins again (these ones were closer, but swam away pretty quickly).
Once at the fort, a park ranger gave all that wanted to hear a brief lesson about the fort, pointing out interesting features. After that, Zack and I walked around the fort, seeing the same remnants of structures partially destroyed during the civil war.
Originally, the walls were five feet thick of solid brick. Normal cannonballs didn’t do much damage to the fort, but more developed ballistics eventually took off the top two floors. Some rounds are still in the wall even to this day.
After our hour at the fort was up, we loaded back onto the ferry, and began heading back to shore. During the ride, Zack and I (mostly myself) struck up a conversation with a man named Jim, who shares our passion for travel (him and his wife have been living in an RV travelling the country for nearly a decade).
Back on shore, Zack and I made our way back over to the car, enjoyed a lunch of turkey sandwiches, and got in the car to make our way over to where we would be staying for the night. Though it was a short drive (only about three hours), I could feel myself starting to slowly turn red from the time spent in the sun. By the time we made it to Marty’s house, both of us were definitely burnt (me more so then Zack).
When we pulled into the driveway, two pit bulls came up to the fence leading into the backyard to greet us. Gracie (the younger one) barked up quite a storm, but was very friendly once she realized Zack and I weren’t there to hurt her. Kia (the older one) was pretty calm throughout the whole ordeal of new guests. After some brief introductions between Marty, Zack and I, we decided to go out and grab a pizza for dinner. Once dinner was finished, we went back to her house, and had an enjoyable conversation about life until after midnight.
Interesting Observations:
-College students are fairly stereotypical. When walking around Charleston, Zack and I saw a store for college students; though, rather than having local college merchandise and apparel, it was pretty much just a store to buy cigarettes and alcohol.
-Harvard, though prestigious, apparently doesn’t have the most intelligent graduates. Here’s a sign we saw while walking into the Pizza Hut:
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