Charleston, SC

One of our favorite wedding gifts was an awesome gift certificate to a B&B in Charleston, South Carolina. With all the craziness of consulting, work travel, moving and wanting to wait until the weather was good in SC, it took us a while to take advantage of the gift certificate. But we finally did this past weekend and it was awesome!

Charleston is such a beautiful city - in some ways it actually reminded me of Antigua, Guatemala ... Beautiful architecture, kind of a quaint, colonial feel to the city, fun colors on the houses, gorgeous flowers, some cobblestone streets, etc. It really is beautiful and a great city to walk around - especially when the weather is so beautiful like it was this past weekend!

Not only did we do a ton of walking but we also took a fun horse carriage ride which took us around downtown Charleston and pointed out a lot of the interesting history of the city. Like the fact that Charleston was originally only a 60 mile sandbar and the rest of the city was "man-made"! The city is right on the waterfront - we actually saw dolphins the first morning! - with part of the city actually below sealevel.

And one of the other stops on our tour was actually our B&B (we felt kinda famous when the passengers on our tour ohh'd and ahh'd over our B&B!!). Our B&B was a wedding gift from a father to his daughter - she woke up on the morning of her wedding with a $75k check pinned to her pillow and a note telling her to build the house of her dreams on the B&B's lot. What she built is now sometimes referred to as the Wedding cake house (and happens to be 3 houses away from her dad's house - guess daddy wanted to keep his little girl close by!). The B&B was awesome ... Always nice to be pampered and to have afternoon tea and crumpets on the veranda ;)

We also went outside of Charleston one day to take in some of the sights outside of the city. We toured Magnolia Plantation (another wedding present from father to daughter!) where there are some gorgeous gardens - unfortunately, the magnolias were not in bloom, seeing those reminds me of my grandparents - but there were lots of other gorgeous blooms and Brad and I enjoyed some photography.

The other major activity of the weekend was definitely eating! I guess Charleston is known for some great restaurants and we certainly enjoyed ourselves in that department. We ate some awesome meals at FIG (Food is Good) which is focused on locally sourced and sustainable ingredients, Cru Cafe (a lunch cafe whose main chef was trained at Le Cordon Blue, and note that "Cru" Cafe is on Motley Ave .. hee hee), SNOB (Slighty North of Broad - definitely our best meal, just outstanding Southern style cooking) and finally Hominy Grill for southern style b'fast including grits, of course! I'm pretty sure Brad and I aren't going to eat for another week!



All in all, it was a great weekend and well worth the wait!!