#19: Take a Vacation with Friends - Part II

This is a continuation of my last post...

Tuesday:

Tuesday was all about the water. 

Back on Edisto Island, we headed to the beach in the morning! 

Justin was determined to build a sandcastle. 

I just looked up the word "sandcastle" because spell-checker was telling me it wasn't one word.  Here is the definition: 

sand·cas·tle   (sānd'kās'əl)  
n.  A castlelike structure built of wet sand, as by children at a beach.

Hmmm, children at the beach....or Justin.

There were some really beautiful houses along the shore.

For the afternoon, we had signed up for a dolphin kayaking tour.  I think this was my favorite thing we did on the whole trip!

Looking back on these pictures, I feel like I look pretty stupid in my sunhat, but it was totally worth keeping the sun off my face the whole time.

We saw a TON of dolphins and I was kicking myself for not bringing my camera for fear of it getting wet.  Rachel & Karen had theirs though, and they snapped a few pictures.  Look how close the dolphin got to Justin!!  At one point they were probably 5 feet from him.  We got within 10-15 feet probably.  It was so neat!

Trevor and I showing off our teamwork!

The kayak tour lasted almost 3 hours, so we were all exhausted and ready for a shower when we got home. 

After we made dinner at the condo, we headed out for some ice cream and then we decided to venture over to a nearby church/graveyard that our tour guide told us about on the ghost tour in Charleston.  Remember the mausoleum I mentioned in the last post?  When we were there, the guide was telling us about a horrible story that had happened on Edisto Island.  In 1850, a young girl came down with yellow fever.  The doctor declared her dead when he could not see her breathing or feel her pulse.  At that time, bodies were buried as quickly as possible since they thought the disease could still be spread.  She was laid in the family mausoleum and the stone door was locked.  15 years later, one of the men in the family was killed and after his funeral they went to open the mausoleum to put him in there.  What they found was horrifying.  The little girl was lying in front of the stone door instead of on the shelf where her body was laid.  She had not actually died, and when she woke up she must have been yelling and screaming and trying to get out until she eventually died of dehydration.  Our ghost tour guide said that if you visit the mausoleum, you can see the scratches near the door from when she was trying to get out.  I think being buried alive has got to be the creepiest thing ever.  The "ghost" part of the story is that supposedly the door would never stay shut after that.  The girl apparently wanted no one else to ever be trapped like that again.  

Here's the mausoleum  where she was buried.  We didn't find any scratches on the walls, but it was still kind of creepy.

The rest of the night was much more light-hearted.  We had some good times playing games and watching a movie back at the condo. 

Wednesday:

We got up early to head into Savannah with the intention of getting there early enough to get reservations for Paula Deen's restaurant "Lady & Sons".   We had been told that we had to eat there.

Savannah was about 2 hours away from our condo. After we arrived around 10:00, we headed straight for the restaurant (you have to make reservations in person).  We couldn't get a reservation for the 6 of us until 9:15 that night!  Crazy!  I just read online that the place can hold up to 300 people at once too.  So apparently it's a very popular place.  Since we didn't think we'd be in Savannah that late, we settled with just visiting the Paula Deen Store next door.

We started walking down to the Riverfront after that.  Savannah, like Charleston, has a lot of beautiful, old buildings. 

The Cotton Exchange - It was designed to stand out from its neighboring buildings as a symbol of cotton's importance to the city's economy.

After eating lunch at Tubby's Tank House Seafood on the Riverfront, we took a carriage ride around the historic district.

   Jones Street - called "The Most Beautiful Street in America" by Southern Living magazine.  The hanging Spanish Moss was so pretty everywhere on our trip down there.  I loved it when it covered the roads we were driving on like in the picture below.

We split off into couples after the carriage ride to do our own thing.  Trevor and I shopped and went and visited some of the sites we saw on the carriage tour.

This picture of me is in front of Chippewa Square.  The bench scene from Forrest Gump was filmed here.   The bench has since been moved to a museum, but it was sitting right in front of that stone wall behind me (there were no flowers when they filmed).  They took down the one-way sign for the movie because they actually reversed the traffic while filming.  The traffic normally flows counter-clockwise around the square, but they changed it to clockwise, so that the bus door would open to the bench.

We headed back to Edisto Island for supper and ate at the Waterfront Restaurant.  After dinner, Trevor and I decided to go for a walk along the beach around the time the sun was setting.  It was really pretty and it was nice to take a relaxing stroll in the sand.   We figured we should take the opportunity while we had it.  It's not like there's a lot of beaches in Kansas!

 

Thursday:

We still had some things that we wanted to do in Charleston that we didn't have time to do on Monday, so we took a trip back there Thursday morning. 

Trevor and Justin really wanted to go to Fort Sumter.  Blair and Rachel had already been there, so they took the opportunity to instead go see the U.S.S. Yorktown.U.S.S. Yorktown

We took a half-hour boat ride to get to Fort Sumter.

Fort Sumter was where the Civil War began in 1861.  South Carolina had just declared its secession in December 1860, when the Federal government took possession of the fort.  South Carolina repeatedly called for the United States evacuation of the fort, but they were ignored.  Finally on April 12, 1861, the confederates decided to take Fort Sumter back by force and opened fire on the fort in the middle of the night.  They continued this for the next 34 hours.  The Union ended up lowering the Fort Sumter flag as a sign of surrender. The flag was raised again when the Union retook the fort four years to the day after it was lowered- April 14,  1865.  I think one of the most interesting stories we heard from the guide was that Abraham Lincoln had been invited to the celebration.  He rejected the invitation when he was told by his advisors that they did not feel it would be safe for him to go, as he was not very well-liked in Charleston, and besides, he already had theater tickets for that night.  Lincoln instead went to Ford Theatre that night...for the last time.  Ironic, huh?  The guide said that if you are ever invited to Charleston, you should seriously consider not turning down the invitation.

Trevor with a mortar shell still in the walls of the fort.The view of Charleston on the way back from the fort.Karen and I on the boat.

We decided to eat lunch at Hyman's Seafood.  It is apparently a very popular place to eat and has been frequented by many celebrities.  Just look who had sat at our table!We tried boiled peanuts for the first time.  I can't say I'm a big fan.

We headed back to Edisto Island and hung out at the condo until we all decided to go for a walk on the beach during the sunset.This was the same area that we had seen the dolphins when we were kayaking earlier in the week.  There were quite a few of them out there again that night and Trevor decided to try and swim out to them.  He got a little further out than he should have and started getting swept away from where we were on the beach.  When he finally got back he said it was one of only two times in his life he thought he might die.  Nice, huh?  That would have made for a lovely vacation.  He's sure always been a daredevil. 

This video is of the dolphins and of Trevor out there with them.   He's the little speck behind Karen and Justin.  After a little while you can see the dolphins popping up.  You can also hear me yelling at him and saying "he should not be out there that far!"

  Later as we were walking farther along the beach, we came across some people who had found a horseshoe crab.   They let the boys hold it.

  

Friday:  

Friday morning Trevor and I got up early to complete one of my 101 in 1001 goals (post about it coming soon...I'm sure the anticipation is killing you!). 

The rest of the day we enjoyed our last day of relaxation and spent time playing in the waves (they were high!) and eating lunch at the beach.   After that, we just hung out and did a little shopping until it was time for dinner.

We decided on one last, nice dinner on Edisto Island.

Trevor ordered dolphin.  And it really bothered me to watch him eat it.  I don't like seafood, but none of the other fish he ate bothered me.  I'm not exactly sure why, but it did.  I think it was after just seeing the dolphins out playing in the ocean.  I mean, Trevor had just swam with them the night before.  We joked  that he was just out there picking out the one he wanted to eat.  I decided that dolphins just seem "too happy" to eat.

(Thanks to an anonymous poster - I have no idea how they found my blog - I was wrong about Trevor eating dolphin - I guess it was dolphin fish.  The menu definitely just said "dolphin" though!)

We tried to get some nice pictures of all of us...

This picture cracks me up!

Then we went to get some ice cream for the last time.  Karen wanted us to do a "fun" picture.  I think Trevor missed the memo that it was supposed to be a "fun" picture, not a "crazy" picture! :)

Saturday:   

We left early Saturday morning (about 4:45 AM Eastern Standard Time) and drove straight through for 18 hours and got back to Kansas City at about 10:00 PM our time.  It made for a long day.

I'm so glad we got to have this experience.  We really had a wonderful time!