Friday, April 29, 2011

Charleston, part 2

For our last day in Charleston, we did more walking and touring of homes. This time in downtown, we actually went inside several of the historic homes, and I bet we walked miles and miles! Here we are in front of our trolley that took us across the bridge to downtown.


First stop was the Manigault house. It actually had a huge piazza on the other side. Inside had been changed quite a bit, because the house changed hands several times. In the depression, it was converted into a boarding house, and subsequently occupied by the USO.





The next house was also impressive. One of my favorite things about this architecture was the windows on the piazzas. They started at floor level, were very tall (of course, because the ceilings were high for better airflow), and they opened high enough to use as doors onto the piazza. This created more breeze and crowd circulation during parties.


Next was a home on the battery- we were at the top of the peninsula, and would now make our way all the way down to the bottom. This one was my favorite home in town. It had the large window/doors and a beautiful piazza.






This is me on the lovely piazza taking a rest on a joggling board. They are contraptions originally designed to give arthritic women exercise, and then later used as a way for courting couples to scoot next to one another!

We headed over to the Nathaniel Russell house, home of the magnificent flying staircase. It was different from the others... Very ornate. It was said that it took years to build- can you imagine?

At this point we were all starting to run out of steam a bit, but we huffed over to the last home on our tour list. George Washington had rented this home out in the 1700's while in Charleston! Alas, we were about 5 minutes too late, and the tour guides were ready to call it a day.

We piddled around awhile and had dinner before catching the trolley back to our resort.

Happy birthday, Hillary! What a fun trip!


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