We woke up Friday morning (after a glorious sleep-in) to some pretty gloomy clouds. Good thing we got our trip to the beach in the day before! We hit up the hotel buffet for breakfast and plotted our day while overlooking the river. Have I mentioned how awesome our hotel was?! We decided to hit the market!
Love me some downtown Charleston!
The chaos that is The Market.
You can only imagine David's anxiety about getting his toe stepped on.
For those of you not familiar with Charleston, The Market is an open-air area full of vendors and shops. Most have wares from around the city, but there is a pretty wide range of goodies. You can find everything from candy to sweetgrass baskets to photographs to antique baseball cards to chess sets! It sounds like a lot of stuff because it is. We decided to make one good stroll through The Market before we decided to purchase anything. Didn't want to get any buyer's remorse if we found something better later on!
A few things caught our eyes but we didn't leave with a ton. The things we did get: an orange pashmina (gotta support the Tigers and Gators!), some earrings for me, an ornament for our tree (we get one everywhere we go), and two beautiful photographs. The pictures caught our eye the first time we walked through so we asked the photographer a few questions about them. We decided to keep walking in case we found something better, but in my heart I knew they would look perfect in our house! On our second trip back through we bought them and I couldn't be happier. We even picked up frames and hung them up this weekend!
We then hit up King Street for some more shopping and browsing. Poor David was such a good sport through all this! About this time we considered getting lunch, but were both so full from the breakfast buffet that we decided to bypass it and hit up the Aquarium instead. In our infinite wisdom we decided the walk would do us some good after all the food we'd been eating, so we walked from The Market area to the Aquarium. Y'all, this was not a joke. This was a serious walk!
My own street!
When we got there we saw a ridiculously long line outside. After much hemming and hawing we decided to try to see Fort Sumter instead. Just our luck that the last boat of the day would have just left minutes before. Cool. We looked through the little museum then went back out to stand in the Aquarium line again. After about 5 minutes we decided that neither of us are very invested in sea creatures and will save that adventure for our future kiddos. We then walked all the way back to The Market area for supper.
The SUPER long line
We may have missed the boat, but we didn't miss the opportunity for a picture!
Cooper River Bridge
Earlier in the day we had gotten a coupon for a free appetizer at The Noisy Oyster. We're big into saving the moola, so we headed over there. Y'all are going to think I'm a snob, and I promise I'm not, but this place was about as bad as A.W. Shuck's was the night before! Our waiter was a little clueless about everything and kept us waiting for quite a while and when we finally did get our food, you could tell it was microwaved. Ever had microwaved seafood? I don't recommend it. Then when I asked for a side dish he had forgotten, he argued with me that I wasn't supposed to get it. I hung onto my Southern charm and decided it wasn't worth the battle. He must have realized he was wrong because a few minutes later he dropped the cole slaw off as he walked by. Note to self, the non-chain restaurants are always a better idea! We headed back to the hotel for fro-yo and baseball.
David's extreme excitement for fro-yo
Cereal as a mix-in for fro-yo= pure genius
The next morning we hit up a local diner for a delicious breakfast before hitting the road!
Pondering the ways of the world
Yummy breakfast spot!
All in all it was a fantastic trip to a fantastic city! Where did you go on your favorite vacation?!?
I so want to go back to Charleston after reading your recap posts! Looks like an awesome trip!
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