Day 12: Charleston, SC

We rallied today, and managed to hit some of the highlights of Charleston that we had missed yesterday.

First, we took on Fort Sumter, which was built to guard Charleston Harbor after the War of 1812 and is infamously known as the site where the first shots of the Civil War rang out. The fort had been occupied by Union forces, and this, of course, infuriated the South Carolinians, who had declared their secession from the Union a few months earlier. Tensions came to a head at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, when a Confederate mortar fired from nearby Fort Johnson exploded over Fort Sumter signaling the nearby artillery batteries to begin firing on the Union garrison. The resulting battle lasted 34 hours, and the federal troops were forced to surrender. Amazingly, no lives were lost during that battle. But during the 100-gun salute that the Confederates ordered from the Union troops as part of the conditions of surrender, which seems to me to be a douchey request on the part of the Confederates, one of the Union solider's cannon misfired; he lost his arm at the shoulder and was killed instantly. That was the first fatality of the Civil War, which eventually look the lives of 620,000 more men.



We took a 30-minute ferry ride out to the fort, listened to a ranger talk, and then had an hour to explore the fort -- or the remains of the fort, actually. The kids marveled at the cannons, and we discovered shells embedded in the brick walls. I was amazed to learn that the island itself had to be constructed on top of an underwater sandbar out of 70 tons of granite brought in from New England. The project began in 1828, but construction on the fort was not even finished by the time the war erupted in 1861.

This picture cracks me up. Look at Natalie. She looks SO interested! But she's going to rock her 8th-grade American history class next year.

Back on the mainland, we returned to our car, which had been parked near Calhoun Street, the east-west thoroughfare that bisects Charleston, drove it about a mile south down the waterfront and parked it in the French Quarter, an area loaded with restaurants and shops. After lunch, we walked along the waterfront to the Battery, a park at the southern tip of the Charleston Peninsula. As we rounded the point, we could see huge, dark clouds bearing down on us from the west.  So we scurried through the park and turned back north on King Street, the historic district's main drag, planning to loop back around to the car. Armed with his phone and Google Maps, Keith charged ahead, the kids followed, and I brought up the rear to wrangle stragglers. We passed through a verdant neighborhood of meticulously maintained colonial homes, leafy courtyards and overflowing window boxes. (Later, we looked up some of the real estate on the Internet; a house in this neighborhood is running in the millions of dollars.) The homes turned to antique shops and quaint cafes, which eventually gave way to stores like Banana Republic and Williams Sonoma as we plowed father north through the drizzling rain.





Speaking of plowing father north, I had been thinking that it was about time to turn back east toward the car, but Keith had the phone and the map and he seemed to know where he was going, so I followed.  Finally Keith announced that Calhoun Street was just ahead. Thank goodness! Because we were all pretty soggy by this point. But wait ... Calhoun Street? That's where we parked when we took the ferry to Fort Sumter. Keith had forgotten that we had since moved the car a mile south for the express purpose of avoiding a longer walk. We had to double back -- in the rain -- to find the car. On the plus side, we took a nice walking tour of the historic district -- in the rain -- and felt like we finally got some sense of Charleston. In the rain.

Also, it was raining.

The original plan was to return to the campground in the heat of the afternoon and let the kids explore the splash park there. Switching gears, we decided to stay downtown to visit the South Carolina Aquarium, a small but engaging facility featuring displays of aquatic life from the South Carolina seashore as well as inland lakes and marshes.



The rain stopped by the time we left the aquarium and headed back the the campsite. It must rain quite a bit here, because everything is in a constant state of dampness -- and that includes our clothes, our towels, our tents, our hair, our selves. And the campground is lousy with toads -- some the size of my fist -- which, as Keith pointed out, explains the bloody, squishy spots we find on the road on the way to the bathroom.

We enjoyed a big campfire tonight, and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, then followed that up with board games before bed. Fun day!