Charleston, SC - Fort! Sumter!

Finally! We actually stopped running errands long enough to see the sights of historic Charleston. There aren't very many modern buildings within the city, there is some law on the books that you can't demolish historical structures so instead they get restored. For example, the garage doors on the fire department are too small to accommodate modern-size fire trucks but they aren't allowed to change them, so they just use smaller trucks. We saw ads for "100% Donkey-Free!" carriage tours (I guess there aren't enough horses to pull all the tourists around so they sometimes use mules, but discriminating travelers accept no substitutes!), but we opted for the air-conditioned bus tour since it looked like rain. They really packed a lot into the 90 minute tour, but it was good to get an overview of the city.

From there we took a boat (not our boat) over to Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. In case you can't think back to 11th grade history: Southern troops fired on a Union garrison that wouldn't leave even though South Carolina had seceded from the Union. There was a short "talk" given by one of the rangers and it was hard to keep a straight face -- for fifteen minutes the guy shouted the history like a drill sergeant..."For thirty-six hours! The bombardment continued! Major Anderson! Refused to surrender!". Small children in the tour group were scared out of their wits and a few started crying. I'm sure that guy has a heck of a headache when he goes home after shouting all day. Although it was cool to walk around such an integral piece of our nation's history, in the end (as Kevin put it): "You've seen one fort, you've seen them all."

We also checked out the largest residence in Charleston: Calhoun Mansion. At 24,000 square feet (no, I didn't mistype) it was immense. Interestingly, the family that built it lost everything in the stock market crash and they sold off all the furniture during the Depression to try to help pay their debts. So only one piece of original furniture is in the house today, but the current owner is what you'd call a "collector". He's got every square foot crammed with expensive and ornate knick-knacks, everything from oil masterworks to priceless antique furniture, even an altar from a church that he's set up in the house because "he liked the way it looked". It looked like he tried to cram the contents of five very different museums into the same house. He actually lives there when he's in Charleston which I can't even imagine -- I'd probably spill spaghetti sauce on a $50,000 persian rug or knock over a Ming vase or something.