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The son of our friends, Clif and Terry Grim, attends the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah. Each year, SCAD sponsors a Sidewalk Arts Festival. The Grims decided to turn their visit to Chris this year into a group affair. We were invited to join them and two couples that I used to work with at IBM, Fran and Marsha Ward and Chuck and Laura Ennis. The Festival was April 29th. We decided to combine the trip to Savannah with a side trip to Charleston since neither of us could remember ever being there.

We arrived in Savannah on Tuesday and left from the airport for Charleston, arriving in a couple of hours. We took the scenic route up the coast through Beaufort, although the road doesn't actually hug the coastline. We saw dense trees rather than ocean during the drive.

We were unable to get a bed and breakfast in downtown Charleston for all the three nights that we wanted. So, we booked a hotel room across the harbor in Mt. Pleasant for the first night. This gave us a chance to see the coast and the towns of Sullivan's Island and Isle of Palms as well as part of Mt. Pleasant. We checked into the Homewood Suites and then had dinner at Vickery's on Shem Creek. The creek is very scenic.

Click on any picture to see a full-size version. There are two more pages of thumbnails and trip report that can be accessed by clicking on the "page" link at the top or bottom of the page. Or, just follow the forward/backward arrows on the full-size pictures and skip my commentary entirely!

After spending the night in Mt. Pleasant, we drove to Charleston on Wednesday morning. First stop was the Visitor's Center where we watched the requisite movie on the city, picked up walking tour maps, and headed out. We saw many of the oldest homes on the walking tour. We had no idea that so much was preserved so well or that downtown Charleston had not been invaded by high rises and was mostly residential. Jane's pedometer logged us at over 15,000 steps. We dodged a couple of thundershowers but the rain didn't affect our plans. Late in the afternoon we checked into the 1837 Bed and Breakfast. The building was constructed (surprise!) around 1837. We had a nice room in the old carriage house. With advice from a lady on the plane and the innkeeper, we had a Lowcountry dinner at the 82 Queen restaurant.

The next morning (Thursday), after a great B&B breakfast, we headed out to explore some more. We walked over to the waterfront and bought tickets for the afternoon boat tour to Ft. Sumter. Then we headed off to see the rest of the antebellum (most are actually pre-Revolutionary War) houses that we had missed the first day. After a BBQ lunch, we walked back to the Ft. Sumter park headquarters to board the boat.

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