Charleston Does Not Disappoint
21 December 2010 | Still on the hard in Charleston
Jill
So often something long anticipated does not live up to the expectation. I was worried that might be the case with Charleston. Driving to the Charleston City Boatyard from the airport and running errands on Monday had shown me a region that I liked for the water, the rivers and tidal flats, but that looked like so much of suburban America, a pretty interchangeable grouping of chain stores and fast food restaurants arrayed along a network of four lane highways between the interstates. We'd even gone into the city some, and aside from the amount of waterfront (and I always love waterfront) I saw nothing to really captivate me.
That changed as soon as Amy and I began our tour on foot. We started with the Charleston market at the foot of Market Street. The market is a series of about three block-long narrow buildings that form a median for Market Street. It is old; it started as a slave market! Now it's filled with small booths with displays of great local crafts and trinkets. I bought some gifts there, some local and some imported crafts. I got a sweetgrass basket, which is a local craft, and every craftsperson I saw displaying and working on the baskets was black. They are made from a combination of local flora, pine needles, bull rushes, palm leaves and sweetgrass.
After the market we ate at a local restaurant and I had to try a cup of she-crab soup. As you might guess from the name, it's a soup made from crabmeat and crab roe, and it is good.
At this point I was starting to appreciate the city, but that was nothing compared to the old town along the Battery and south of Broad. There Charleston was everything I had thought it would be. Beautiful, tall, narrow houses fronting small streets with glimpses of lush courtyards in between. We walked along the Battery, a raised seawall that goes along the Cooper and Ashley Rivers and protects the old town from storms. The first things I saw when we got up to the Cooper River were dolphins out in the water!
Battery park, along the Ashley River right at Oyster Point (where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers come together) is a long narrow park completely shaded by live oaks with the river on one side and a row of mansions on the other. We wandered back a few side streets and you could tell the streets and houses had been there since well before the civil war. The picture above is one of the streets leading off the Battery along the Cooper River. I've put a few other photos in the gallery.
We ended our tour at Charles Towne Landing, a state historic site across the Ashley River at the site of the first English settlement. Ten years after the founding in 1670, the town moved across to the current downtown area.
The one bad note in the day is that Bud called to tell me that the parts guy tracked our engine mounts and they'd been mistakenly sent to Louisiana. So another pair was ordered and sent overnight for tomorrow. That's our last chance to get in the water before Christmas!