Day 40 – What a cool City

Charleston is a pretty cool place to visit from what I was able to see in a day.  There were a lot of tourists here, probably because of a cruise ship that was docked, but they have some really neat houses and tours inside those homes, which I was not able to take because of the limited time.  Carey has told me before that this is one City that she would like to visit and I am sure that she would enjoy it.  We will have to make it a goal to come back.  They have great restaurants and many tourist attractions based upon the history of this city.

The tours that the city offers are carriage rides.  There are plenty of companies doing them, but the city must have limited the types of tours to these exclusively because you either walk or you ride the carriages.  I took one of these tours and it was pretty good but it was very slow and because of that, I am sure you don’t see very much.  In fact the city gives the carriages a lottery number and that determines where the driver can take you.  I guess they do this to limit the carriages that are blocking traffic all over the city.  It was interesting though and gave you some places that you wanted to go back and spend more time.  They do have some great southern mansions like you see in Gone With the Wind.

I also went out to visit Fort Sumter.  You are all probably up on your American History, but that is where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.  It was a pretty small place, but the history behind it all was very interesting.  There really is not much of it left because when the Union took it back in 1865, they did it after firing on the Confederates in the Fort for 22 months.  The Confederates never did surrender the Fort, they just abandoned it.

The day went too quickly today and we are back to riding tomorrow.  To see this city, we took a spur route into here and will have to back track that route tomorrow to get back on the designated route.  Because of that, it will be another pretty big day of 75 miles.

Fort Sumter

A shell still imbedded in the wall

Some homes