No bed bugs or holes in the sheets to report at the Holiday Inn Express last night. Heck, they even served up a great breakfast. I’d give’m four stars.

We began our day at the Boone Hall Plantation just outside Charleston. Just the drive through the row of oak trees was worth the whole trip east!

Back in 1743 Captain Boone planted eighty live oaks along the entrance road to his house. All but two are still there. One was taken out by a hurricane and another was struck by lightning. They are huge!

There are a couple things I didn’t know about live oaks. One: their wood is so dense that one square foot weighs seventy five pounds. Two: Their roots can be as large as their branches and interlock with the trees on the other side of the road to stabilize them. Thus, they have been able to ride out all the hurricanes since 1743.

There have been four houses where the present one sits. One burned, two were torn down. The current one was built around 1932 using materials salvaged from house number three.

Evidently folks were a lot shorter and wider back in the day. The doorknobs were at hobbit level and the doors were wide enough to walk through wearing a hoop skirt.

Overall it was nice for an old house, but missed the antebellum mark because it wasn’t.

The carriage ride around the plantation was informative. It is still a working farm.

But the most interesting part was touring the servants quarters that were constructed from discarded bricks when the plantation manufactured bricks from clay scooped from the marshes at low tide. In fact, most of downtown Charleston’s old buildings were made with bricks from the Boone Plantation.

Near the end of our visit a descendant of the Gullah tribe presented an oral history of her people in stories and song. She was beyond impressive.

We left in time to catch a historical carriage ride tour in old Charleston. Or as the guide pronounced it, Charles Town.

Evidently they loaded the carriage by size. Tina and I were placed on the front seat with the driver who was not a small guy. We could hear him just fine, but Tina had a hard time seeing around him to catch what he was talking about.

Halfway through the hour long tour, Ricky the horse, took a potty break. Well, it wasn’t exactly a break. It was a working break. Our front row seat became even more interesting as we watched everything fall into the bag strapped to Ricky’s rear end.

After that interesting tour we took in some fresh air as we walked down Market Street and saw a lot of wares artists had for sale.

As the sun began to set we went to Washington Park for a ghost tour of the older part of town. A young lady named Ashley was our guide.

There were some interesting finds along the walk. We both have relatives buried in the same graveyard surrounding the Circular Congregationalist Church on Meeting Street.

One of the stories she told was about a child that was entombed in a family crypt after succumbing to the plague in the 1700s. When they opened the crypt for another body they found the little girl propped up, sitting by the door. There were claw marks on the inside of the door.

Did you know Edgar Allen Poe’s love, Annabel Lee, is buried in an unmarked grave in Charleston? I didn’t. That’s a whole story in itself.

It was an interesting evening and I left her with a story of my own that she said she would have to incorporate into her monologue.

It’s been another great day to be alive and taking a trip on a wing and a prayer.

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Rick Algood
June 27, 2022