We arrived in time to take a quick stroll in the beautiful White Point Garden park (pretty cold and windy unfortunately) before heading off to beat the evening crowd for dinner at Glass Onion ($$; *****). We then made our way to our hotel at the centrally located Comfort Inn ($80/night thanks to Priceline).
The next morning we went to church before brunching at the popular (1-hr long wait) Hominy Grill ($$; ****) where we had shrimp & grits, biscuits & gravy, eggs & cheese, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and ginger nut bread. Then we spent the whole afternoon in the Boone Hall Plantation which was actually very cool, though a little hard to manage--what with the cold winds and our youngsters in tow--touring through antique houses and such. The plantation was actually the site of the recent blessed union between Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, and is also home to the famous spot where the hunky Ryan Gosling jumped into the river on 'The Notebook'.
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| The famous Oak Avenue with 88 oak trees lining the entryway to the mansion. |
The following morning--our last day in Charleston--we hopped on a carriage to be treated to a 1-hour tour by mule of one of three randomly selected (to avoid carriage congestion in the small streets) routes of the city. We got lucky by getting the "waterfront" route, where we got to see such things as a dueling alley (where Andrew Jackson was known to get into trouble), some fascinating home architecture [$1- to $10-million homes with such features as ornate piazzas (or porches), pastel stucco facades (to conceal the stigmatized brick construction), and manual cranks used to restore toppled walls after an earthquake], some historic churches, and original cannonballs from the civil war siege.
Then we grabbed lunch at Husk ($$$; ****), which was delicious. I can't say enough about the ease of finding a good, decently priced, Southern restaurant in Charleston.
Before our afternoon departure we made sure to stop in at the Calhoun mansion--an impressive 24,000 sf mansion we had taken note of during our carriage tour. This place was incredible, and lavishly decorated with original artwork galore. But, unfortunately, I only got to see the front room of the place because as the tour guide was in the middle of his presentation Eli started crying and then Rae kept repeating that she wanted a drink, and the tour guide had had enough and he asked his assistant to return my ticket stubs to me and demanded that I choose the child that I wanted to escort out of the tour and get my refund at the ticket counter. I grabbed Rae and headed for the exit and said "thank you" (I have no idea why) on my way out.
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| Two Meeting Street. This house was a wedding present from the owner of the Calhoun Mansion just down the street. |
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