Touring Charleston
Our flight to Seattle on Monday was (scheduled for) 5:15, so we took most of the day to do a walking tour of downtown Charleston. I’ve done this a few times, but Mrs. Perils had never been there. The weather was perfect - sunny, nice breeze, just warm enough. We started by parking at the end of the city’s new bridge over the Cooper River and walking up a capacious bike/pedestrian lane to its apex, where there’s a wide panoramic view of the harbor and the city.
(Click on any of these to enlarge)
Then we drove downtown and just meandered along the Battery and up and down many sidestreets looking at the charming old houses and commercial buildings.
As tightly-packed as these houses are, and as expensive as they must be to keep up, it seems an equal effort is made to maintain inviting garden plots whose coolness must be welcome in the hot months.
For a more extensive slide show of our meanderings, go here.
While it’s hard to imagine a perfect day that ends with 8 hours of cross-country air travel, I had used miles to secure us first class seats on both legs of our flight home, so I was feeling pretty good as we headed to the airport. I got through security with several bottles of Crying Onion beer that my brother wanted me to take home to our son, and was waiting to board and sip a cool glass of wine when they announced that our plane had a mechanical problem and would be delayed. No problem, I thought, as we had a little over two hours in Atlanta.
Things got worse when they announced that our plane would need a part that was inbound on a later flight. That would mean that we’d miss our Atlanta-Seattle connection (and our first-class seats), plus it was the last flight to Seattle that night. People started lining up in 3 long lines to try to rebook, and our once-languid evening turned into a nightmare of anxiety. There was one earlier flight to Atlanta that would get us there in time for our connection, but the lines were moving so slowly that I was sure we would never get booked on it, even if it did exist, and left on time.
It was a pretty close thing, but we did get on that earlier flight (though in row 37 next to the MD80 engine instead of first class), and made it to our scheduled Seattle flight with a little time to spare, and things ended well.
