Charleston Trip

Damn, It's been forever in a day since I blogged.
This is about the trip we took to Charleston, SC to visit Katie and Sarah.
The stories are fading, so I'll just pull out the highlight reel.

This is the beginning of our trip. First stop, New Harmony, Indiana. This is the New Harmony "Labyrinth". But really they changed it into a maze at some point. It was still cool though.

Melissa and Lindsay in the Labyrinth Temple.

This is the visitor's center in New Harmony. I thought this was a nice juxtaposition.


This is the "Roofless Church" in New Harmony. It was very "interesting" in a different kind of way.

A depiction of God.

This is the real Labyrinth in New Harmony.

Melissa won.

Moving on now, this is Cumberland Falls, Kentucky. We stopped to take in the nice sight of falling water. Isn't gravity magnificent. We were a day too early to see the Moonbow. The only one in the Western Hemisphere. It's like a rainbow, but occurring from the light of the moon.

This is a Moonbow bug.

On to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. This is Melissa with the taffy man.

We were minutes from the smoky Mountains, so we decided to go for a hike.

Falling deaths have occurred. We just about saw some too.

However, we didn't see any bears.

This is Laurel Falls, the destination of our hike. The dude that took this picture almost fell off the rocks with my camera while trying to take this.

We couldn't leave the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg/Tourist Trap area until we played some mini-golf.

Finally we arrive in Charleston, South Carolina and meet up with Katie.

We took a night trip to the beach the first night we arrived. It was kind of spooky being the only ones out, and it was very low tide so I felt like I had to cross a desert to get to the water.

Looking for stuff in the sand.

This is a crab that attacked us on the beach.
Scary Story: After the beach, on our drive back to Katie's we had to drive over this new bridge. It's a divided bridge, so each direction has three lanes. I was driving in the far left lane when suddenly I noticed headlights coming straight at me. At first I thought, am I in the wrong lane? Then I didn't think, I just swerved over and some crazy dude flew by going the wrong direction. I just about had a heart attack.

The next day we had a field trip to St. Helena Island to get a tour from Queen Quet of the Gullah-Geeche Nation.
The Gullah-Geeche are descendants of slaves who were put on the string of islands along the East coast to work. The slaves were separated from their "masters" because the slave owners didn't want to live on an island. So they were autonomous people who kept a lot of their African traditions. They stayed on the islands after the Civil War. Today they have duel citizenship, United States/Gullah-Geeche. They even have their own language. The tour was a lot of fun, and most informative. I had no idea who they were or that they even existed before that.



This is the Girl Scout group that was on the tour with us.

Queen's goat.

This is the finale of the Spoleto festival that was going on in Charleston. We had a picnic and watched fireworks.



This guy's in the middle of a war.



Spinning Katie.


This is the Market where Katie goes to sell her Jewelry.





Melissa kept jumping into my photos.

We went on a graveyard ghost tour. They told us a bunch of spooky stories and I tried to get some ghost photo's. I guess they were hiding.

The skull with wings. Predecessor to the cherub.

This is the Angel Oak. It is estimated to be about 1400 years old.





Good bye Katie. That's the end of our trip. We drove 14 hours straight back to St. Louis.