October 25 - Charleston, SC

 To scratch the itch of the travel urge while we wait for Michael to renew his passport and get Visa's for our next trip, we decided to visit Charleston, SC.  Neither of us has been here before and we have heard the food is great.  

Before we arrived we researched a walking tour and downloaded it onto Michael's phone.  I choose the historical overview tour.  If you just walked along the tour route it would take a few hours, but if you went into any of the sites it could take a lot longer.  In fact we may be able to stretch it to three days!

Hibernian Hall - where we started out tour.   There is a lot of construction - remodeling going on in Charleston.  It was hard to get a photo without a bunch of vehicles in it.  I had to make do with this pickup - which kept moving around in front of the building - but refused to leave.

Very near it is Washington Park with this statue of him.  

St Michael's Episcopal Church.

The cemetery.  It is supposed to contain the gravestones of several of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  We did not take the time to find them.

Interesting architecture along the tour route.

Nathanial Russell House.  My favorite of the two homes we visited today.

Painted floor design.

Glass design on double doors entering from the front hall.

The famous spiral staircase.  We were not allowed to walk on these steps - instead took some back steps. 

Details on the design on the wall next to the ceiling.

Formal dining room

A look from the 2nd floor down on the spiral staircase.

One of the formal rooms

Lots of balconies for the owners to walk on.  Not us - except that the bottom of the window is open.  I can't duck down low enough to get out here.  No one else tried either.

The ladies after dinner room.

More detailed work on the top of the wall next to the ceiling.  This design was about twenty years old at the time it was installed in this house - and already out of style!  But the owner had fallen in love with the design and insisted it be used.

It was well after lunch when we finished the tour of the Nathanial Russell House.  All the restaurants were back where we had started and a little further.  So we headed back up Meeting Street and again past St. Michaels.

We ended up at Poogans Porch for lunch.  We shared - she-crab soup, macaroni and cheese and fried chicken bone in - and still took a lot home.  Everything was delicious.  Everyone we mentioned the restaurant name to later said, Oh yea - that's a great place to go.

Accords the parking lot from the restaurant we came upon our first wall art in Charleston.  The sun was very bright over a quarter of it.  So not the best photo.

We walked all the way back the way we had come on Meeting street - all the way to the rivers.

East Battery Street

Houses along the river walkway.  This front yard was dedicated to Halloween.

                                               

We toured this home as well - it was not as well furnished and badly lit.  It is built in the Federalist style.  All the floors have a central hallway with a room on either side.

This painting shows how the house looked in 1831. It is the second house from the left.  This land used to be very marshy until the seawalls were built along the two rivers, Ashley and Cooper.

The library

The ladies room

What was nice about this house is that the rich owner could look out the front windows and see his ship(s) in the harbor.

A later descendant took it upon himself to update the house by adding some Greek or classical revival elements to the house.  Note the arched open doorways.

One last look at the front of the home as we waited for our uber to take us home.

After our huge lunch we opted to share a Bahn Mi sandwich from the small Vietnamese sandwich place across the street from our Airbnb.  It was very tasty - but had a lot of shredded carrots in it.