20+1, An Anniversary Celebration
Last year, Keith and Christine celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary. Sort of. They had plans to travel to Florida for the April break, enjoy the sunshine, kayak with manatees, and ride a fan boat through the Everglades. That is, of course, until Adeline needed surgery and all plans were cancelled. So, in place of a week in Florida, Keith and Christine celebrated for one night at a retreat in Skaneateles.
This year, they avoided Florida’s persistent rebuilding efforts on the west coast and instead travelled to Charleston, South Carolina. Why Charleston? For one, the airline that they had booked through the previous year has limited destinations. This year, the only warmer destinations for the carrier were various airports in Florida (no thank you) and Las Vegas (again, no thank you). Second, it is a city with a nice reputation and enough things to do outside the city that they could be satisfied.
Their flight departed Syracuse in the early evening and arrived in Charleston a little before midnight. After a 25 minute taxi ride, they arrived at their hotel for the next 4 nights: Hotel Bennett.
Hotel Bennett is the most lavish hotel that they will ever likely stay at. The room featured an entry hallway with a walk-in closet. The living quarters were vast, with a sitting chair, desk and chair, built in bookcases, a large dresser with television, and a bathroom that was equal in size to the bedroom with both a soaking tub and a walk in shower. It was immaculate. Oh yeah, and if offered a 5-star restaurant on the ground floor, a legit french patisserie, and a rooftop bar and pool.
It was centrally located as well. Everything that you would want to access downtown was within a mile’s walk, unless you were walking in high heels, of course. It was adjacent to many College of Charleton campus buildings and the original Citadel campus was on an adjacent lot. There was a lot of history in this city.
After waking up Tuesday morning and visiting the patisserie for breakfast, Keith and Christine planned to spend much of the day walking the city sites: the famous market, the waterfront park, and the Rainbow Row (a famous group of row homes that are painted various colors, thus the “rainbow” reference). They took in a few shops along the way, visited the market, and the park too before pausing to look for lunch.
By chance, they decided to go to Hyman’s Seafood for a late lunch. The food was delicious. Keith had MahiMahi croquettes. He had never had a croquette before, but says he never will again, because he can’t imagine it being done better. Christine enjoyed the Grouper and a Chilean Sea Bass croquette.
After lunch, they hailed an Uber to take them to pick up their rental car outside of the city. When they were making plans, the airport had no rentals available, so the plan had been made to take a cab from the airport to the hotel and then pick up the car in the early morning, but by 0815, Keith had received a message from Enterprise to inform him that they had run out of rental cars and were hoping to have one ready for the afternoon. Keith and Christine chuckled, thinking about the scene in Seinfeld when he had the same experience (“You know to take a reservation, but you don’t know how to hold the reservation and the holding of the reservation is the most important part of the reservation.”) Not having a car forced them to change their plans on the spot. They would go to the market on Tuesday instead of Wednesday and go to the beach on Wednesday instead of Tuesday. Anyway … the car was available when they arrived to pick it up at approximately 3:30 so they quickly found themselves heading back to the hotel to shower and prepare for dinner at a local brewery.
Dinner at Edmund’s Oast Brewpub was nice. It wasn’t special, but they weren’t expecting to visit a place that miraculously discovered a way to reinvent the brewpub experience. They ate some pretzels with sandwiches and housemade chips while we enjoyed a flight of local beers. The peanut butter imperial stout was the preferred drink for both Keith and Christine.
The following day, Christine had arranged for a spa morning, so after another trip to the patisserie, she migrated to the second floor of the hotel while Keith went out to try his hand in a bit of street/tourist photography. Christine thought the masseuse was excellent, Keith found the morning light to be challenging.
Christine wanted to take in the beaches while they were in South Carolina, so after their morning activities were complete, Keith and Christine reconvened and departed from the hotel to go to Isle of Palms Beach. After a nice brunch at the ACME low country kitchen, they walked the beach for a couple of miles, long enough for the backs of Keith’s leg to see a little more sunlight than they comfortably should have. The homes were ridiculous. The beach was lovely. They picked up shells for the kids, observed huge equipment reshape the beach, and enjoyed the beautiful weather.
Speaking of weather, now is a good time to mention that there were only some clouds in the sky late in the day on Tuesday. The rest of the week was sunny, cloudless and the temperatures were very, very nice. While the kids were seeing snow in Cazenovia, Keith and Christine experienced a high temperature of 85 on Tuesday, and it was in the 70s on Wednesday and Thursday. The evenings were cool and dropped into high 40s/low 50s, but the days couldn’t have gifted them with better weather.
After the beach, Keith and Christine returned to the city to visit Rainbow Row. The houses were neat, but (as would be the theme for expected photo ops) the promotional imagery far exceeds the physical experience. Keith had actually been to the site while photographing earlier the in day and hadn’t said anything to Christine to not jade her in advance, but she too walked away a little underwhelmed. It was one of those things you needed to say you did if you visited Charleston, but something you really needn’t do.
They then returned to the hotel to shower and get dressed for one of the 2 nicer restaurants that Christine had made reservations at for dinner during their stay. This (Wednesday) night was at 82 Queen. They sat outside under radiant heaters and it was a lovely evening. They started with some fried calamari and Christine wanted to try their award winning She Crab soup, which she would say was excellent. Keith would have the fish and grits, his first time eating grits (he thought is was sorta like cornbread). Christine had the gumbo. Knowing that Keith and Christine were celebrating an anniversary, they were offered (and accepted, of course) a dessert, and enjoyed a light lemon cake before returning to the hotel for the night.
After 2 days in Charleston, Keith and Christine woke up on Thursday already feeling like they had done a lot already, but there was still a little more to be done before departing early the next morning. On Thursday, the agenda was included a drive 30 minutes west of the city to see a local tourist destination (Angel Oak), a kayaking experience, exploring another beach, a last dinner at the top restaurant at the hotel (Gabrielle), and a drink at the rooftop lounge (Fiat Lux).
This was the only morning that Keith and Christine set their alarm to wake up; Keith wanted to photograph the tree in pre-dawn light and Christine was very accommodating and willing to play along. When they were plotting their course in Google Maps, the app said that the tree was closed and Keith laughed. There was a gift shop adjacent to the tree, that was obviously closed. “You can’t close a tree,” he said as he laughed aloud.
Little did he know, however, that the tree was fenced in with a chain-link fence and it really was closed until a park officer would open it later that morning, when they already had plans to go kayaking. So, Christine had woken early to drive 30 minutes to a tree that was closed so that Keith could take a few pictures through a chain-link fence. To be fair, it is a cool tree, but the images that Keith captured through the fence are probably the best available all day. Once people were walking around (and without a long exposure with a tripod) there wouldn’t have been a chance to get a “perfect picture” to hang on a wall anyway.
Remaining as flexible as they had been earlier in the week when the car wasn’t available, they stopped for a coffee and went to a local park in proximity to the kayaking company and settled in for a quiet breakfast.
The kayaking experience was very pleasant. It was billed as a dolphin tour, but was more an ecological tour and Keith and Christine were realistic in their expectations of seeing dolphins, which they didn’t. Still, it was very nice to have a guided tour through the tributaries and a fixed duration that the experience was necessarily going to last.
After the kayaking tour, Keith and Christine drove to explore another beach community, Folly Beach. It too was nice, but different than Isle of Palms. The difference is probably akin to comparing Jones Beach to the Hamptons. The former was for the selectively affluent, the former was for the middle class to splurge for a week. The beach was nice and it also featured a huge fishing pier. Keith and Christine had a chance to watch a young man wrestle with a fish for over 15 minutes only to be disappointed that he hooked a stingray. Keith and Christine stayed long enough to see them net it, but not long enough to learn if the kid and is friend were able to unhook it and get it back in the water before it perished.
Lunch was very conventional at a seaside bar/restaurant. Keith and Christine weren’t looking for good food, only a good view. Pier 101 was perfect to enjoy a cold beverage and overlook the ocean while seated under an umbrella. After another long walk on a beach, Keith and Christine drove the rental back to the rental agency to return the vehicle, use Uber to return to the hotel, and get ready for their last dinner of the vacation.
Gabrielle’s was the swankiest of the 2 nice restaurants. This was fine dining. There was champagne awaiting the couple when they arrived to the table and they were treated well throughout their very tasty meal. It was the perfect quiet setting to look back on the previous few days and try to take it all in one last time.
They evening finished quickly at the rooftop bar, where the winds paired with the cool early evening temperatures to make it a little too cold to make the experience comfortable. The view was nice, though, and it would have been a cool place to hang any night had they visited later in the spring or during the summer months. They hadn’t planned on staying out long anyway, with a 4:00 am pickup from the limo company planned only a short while later the next morning.
3:45 came too soon, when the alarms sounded to get up and go the airport. As we drove out of the city, they could look back and smile knowing that they had just experienced the best few days they could remember in a very long time.