A Great Day in Charleston

We just got back from a great road trip through parts of the South. OK, so we only made it down through Virginia and the Carolinas. Dan's Dad was raised in South Carolina, so we met all of this extended family for a mini reunion near Sumpter, if you know where that it.

For my birthday, Dan's parents watched Joshua while Dan and I stole away to Charleston for the day. We spent a chunk of the morning doing a self-guided walking tour of the historic district downtown. I highly recommend this--what a different world. We saw lots of homes built like the one above on the corner of Meeting and Tradd--this one was built in 1767. I really enjoyed the lessons in architecture. Here's Dan walking on East Battery--maybe you saw the Early Show broadcast on Friday morning (the morning after our tour) from this spot.
Dan says Charleston is just about the only place he could own a pink home. I'm with him on that one. Here I am walking down Rainbow Row, merchant homes restored in the 1930s through the New Deal. The restoration efforts in this city really are amazing. Seriously, the city has been burned down so many times, it's a wonder that people have managed to bring it back to this.
We ended the day at Boone Hall, a 300-year old plantation made famous in the mini-series North and South. Their oak avenue was one of the first of its days and is a subject of lots of photos. This particular avenue was three-quarters of a mile long--impressive!
On a more sobering note, we walked through the original "privileged" slave cabins, the brick cabins you see in the bottom left. The heat was stifling to stay the least, but those cabins reminded me of the hard things from the past that I can't forget.