Our first day trip
was to Charleston, SC. Neither of us had
been there and we decided the best way to see the town was to take a carriage
tour through the city.
So many visitors tour the city via carriages that the City
has a lottery set up. The carriage is
driven to where the lottery is drawn, and then the City employee draws a ball
out of the lottery to determine which route your carriage will take.
We saw some old historical churches....
...rode through the streets of downtown Charleston...
...saw a lot of the smaller (but still expensive) row
houses...
...and then some bigger houses...
and then some REALLY big houses on the Battery.
The trimwork on the houses was amazing:
On several of the houses, the "front door" was
actually an entrance to a big side porch also called a piazza. 
The landscapers on this house had to not only keep the
bushes trimmed but the steps too!
Charleston is known for its many wrought ironwork fences,
gates and decorations.
This house had a very unusual fence and gate:
Another odd item pointed out to us on the tour was the
"earthquake bolts" on many of the houses.
In 1886, Charleston experienced a very devastating
earthquake that lasted for 8 minutes and would have been about 7.7 to 8.5. When the first shock hit, everyone ran from
their houses to see what was going on; but it was the second shock that killed
people and sent 15,000 chimneys toppling to the ground. The earthquake killed fewer than 100 people out
of a population of 35,000. (I'm
surprised it wasn't more.)
Since, Charleston had just been through Reconstruction
during the 1870s, a depression, and two hurricanes in August of 1885, they
didn't have the money to "raze the city" and start over. So what they did was piece by piece they fit
everything back together again and just maybe rearranged slightly. And they inserted these long iron rods in
between each floor of each building and
when everything was ready, very slowly turned these turnbolts to supposedly tighten
the houses back up.
(Source: http://www.charlestonhomelistings.com/Historic_Charleston_Present_and_Past.htm)
We drove through the intersection called "the four
corners of law" -- named this because of the presence of federal, state,
and local offices and a church located at the intersection...
...and by the entrance to Washington Park...
and by Chalmers Street, one of the last remaining original cobblestone streets in Charleston. (Glad the carriage didn't go down that street!)
The carriage wound its way back to where we started. The carriage tour was definitely the best way
for us to do a quick, but informative tour of Charleston.
After eating lunch at the Charleston Crab House, we rode over to the harbor for the boat tour of Charleston Harbor.
We rode past the Battery first (where all the big houses
were).
Next we rode past Castle Pinckney which was briefly used as
a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War.
Then we rode past Fort Sumter which is where the Civil War
started.
We saw some lighthouses....
and nice houses.
As we headed back into the harbor, we rode by Fort
Moultrie. The first fort constructed
here was built out of palmetto logs which inspired the flag and nickname of
South Carolina: "The Palmetto
State."
We could see a hazy view of Charleston and all its steeples
from the boat.
Then we rode by Patriots Point, a naval and maritime museum
that had the USS Yorktown (an aircraft carrier),
the USS Laffey (a destroyer) (to the right of the aircraft carrier)
and the USS Clamagore
(a subway) as well as some aircraft on display.
Next, we went under, around, and then back under the Arthur
Ravenel Jr Bridge that connects Charleston to Mount Pleasant, South
Carolina. The bridge is the 3rd longest
among cable-stayed bridges in the western hemisphere.
When we got under the bridge, the captain stopped the ship
and blew his horn so we could hear how it echoed under the bridge.
As we were headed back to the harbor, we saw a HUGE freight
carrier was making its way under the bridge and out of the harbor.
It was loaded down with cargo containers. These are the same type of containers that we see on railroad cars and tractor-trailer trucks.
It was amazing how big it was. (The pictures don't even come close to
describing how big it was.)
There were two other big carriers in port.
As we were heading back to the dock, we could see another carrier coming into the harbor way off in the distance (I zoomed it in).
By the end of the boat tour, we were pretty pooped. But all in all, it was a great day and a
great way to see the sites of Charleston by land and by sea.
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