Recent Getaway Weekend

And by recent I mean 3 months ago.....

Brooke, Marcia and I waited for airline prices to go down and chose early December to visit Charleston. Marcia had been there before but Brooke had not. We arrived in Charleston at 10:00pm Friday night. Lynda picked us up and took us to my parents' condo in downtown Charleston. Lynda and I regaled Brooke and Marcia with family folklore while enjoying Bijou cocktails until we were ready to crash.

The next morning Lynda went off to paddle and Brooke, Marcia and I headed to the Saturday market at Marion Square. After Lynda rejoined us we headed to see some of the other sites. We strolled through the city market where the big item of interest was baked okra. We headed towards the Battery after stopping at a tourist place to pick up a map and almost get talked into listening to a timeshare spiel so we could get $100 off our dinner at Slightly North of Broad (SNOB) later that night.

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Brooke has a friend who had a relative that owned a little restaurant/grocery store called the Queen Street Grocery and we thought we would try to find it on our walkabout. What we thought would be a couple of blocks away turned out to be a lot further but we had a very nice walk down streets I had never been on. The guy at the tourist place indicated that the area in which the restaurant was located was outside the tourist area and therefore was unsafe. He was, of course, very wrong and we let the guys running the store know what was being spread to gullible tourists (we counted ourselves in that group since we almost fell for the spiel). It turned out that Brooke's friend's relative had sold the business but we still stayed and had a lovely inexpensive lunch. Their specialty is crepes!

From there we headed back to the condo to take in one more Charleston site - Angel Oak - a 65 foot tall live oak providing 17,000 square feet of shade. Amazing!. We hung out for about half hour and then headed back to the condo to change for dinner and meet up with the rents.

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Dinner at SNOB was great. The decor was nice. The waiter, food and wines were good. The activities in the open kitchen were fun to watch. After dinner we went back to the condo and went up to the rooftop which had recently been opened. Lovely sites of the city. We then said good bye to Lynda and headed to Edisto with Mom and Dad.

The next morning we went to the beach and Botany Bay Plantation and drove around the island. We saw dolphins and wild turkeys. On the beach we saw a one legged sandpiper that seemed kinda sad. And when we got too close and he hopped away one from us into the surf his ONE LEG we almost cried from sympathy and guilt. But moments later he nonchalantly pulled his other leg out from where he was hiding it and started looking for food in the sand. Once again we felt like gullible tourists!

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Mom made us a nice shrimp pasta dish before we headed to the airport for our 6:00 flight.

Take a look at the pictures!