Charleston, South Carolina

We awoke early today to take a tour of the Boone Plantation and Historical Charleston. The tour was sanitized so that they were “enslaved servants” and the war was the “war between the states”. Here in Charleston and in the rest of the South they refer to the war as the “War of Northern Aggression”.

We drove out to Mount Pleasant to see a faux plantation which has been restored by some Canadian guy or else as the guide told us it would now be a strip mall. We did see the house and the “praise” house which was their religious hall and the slave quarters. Oh I’m sorry the “enslaved servants”.

Then we drove around the city of Charleston which is actually quite lovely and saw Battery Park and a lot of restored single houses which is defined as a house which has one room wide house that is traditionally two rooms deep with a stair hall built at the main distance at the house with an outside porch called a piazza. That can be open or closed. It is traditionally two stories high. The piazza entry to the home looks like a front door but actually leads to the piazza. Some of them are lovely. The houses were designed to catch the breeze to cool the house. The guide told us that in the summer temperatures can exceed 100 degrees and with the 100% humidity can feel like 115 and in the Old South they did not have air conditioning.

After that we came back to the ship and had lunch and then we stayed in our cabin and listened to the water lapping against the ship and the breeze was lovely and of course I feel asleep. So we went to trivia – unfortunately we lost – I’m embarrassed to say one of the questions is what does J.K. stand for in J.K. Rowling. We were close but wrong.

So then we hung out on the back of the ship for a while watching the pelicans – very big birds – and we also saw several dolphins which actually leapt out of the water. We have a bunch of photos of the dolphins just after they submerged. Such is the justice of life.

So we’ll still be here tomorrow. Tom and I have arranged to have lunch at one of the higher rated restaurants in Charleston. I just cannot do the nine hour trip to Savannah as much as I want to go. So tomorrow will be kind of a weird sea day.

Tomorrow – more of Charleston.