Charleston Continued…

Friday was our only full day in Charleston, and you can rest assured that we did our best to fit everything in!  After eating breakfast, we headed into Charleston, found a parking spot and took a few hours to walk around and check out the city.  We first went to the Historic Charleston City Market.  This is a must see for anyone who visits Charleston, and even though I’ve been more times than I can count, it’s still fun to check out and see if there’s anything worth spending my money on!

Next up, we strolled through the Charleston Place Mall and then down King Street.  At 2:00, we had scheduled a Culinary Tour.  We started the tour at HoM Restaurant where we enjoyed the Calamari, the Dixie Flatbread, and the Green Gobble’N Turkey Burgers.  The Dixie Flatbread was delicious, but all the food was really good.  Here are a few pics:

The next stop on the tour was Sugar Bakeshop.  Here we each had a small red velvet cupcake.  It was good, but no better than The Cupcake Collection in Nashville which continues to be my favorite!  =)

After a very LOOOOONG walk to our 3rd restaurant, we ended up at Rue de Jean, a French café.  Unfortunately, I failed to take any pics at this location, but we enjoyed mussels in a garlic wine sauce and the Pommes Frites.  They were both very yummy.

The final stop on the tour was at an Italian restaurant called Osteria la Bottiglia.  This restaurant had the neatest atmosphere, in my opinion.  The food we enjoyed here was a smaller version of their braised short rib with potatoes.

Overall, the tour was very fun!  However, Patrick and I both agreed that we would have done a lot of it much differently.  For instance, we would have had dessert at the end of the tour instead of the middle.  Also, there was A LOT of walking…and while walking is usually completely fine for me, I do think it’s a bit unfortunate that we walked for probably 1 hour of a 2 and a half hour tour.  On the whole though, the food was good, and it was fun chatting with people from all over the US.

After the tour, we drove out to Sullivan’s Island and Isle of Palms just to take a look at the beach.  It was way too windy that day to spend a lot of time there, so instead, we decided to head back to our room to relax for a bit.  Later that evening, we decided to head back downtown to The Noisy Oyster for a late night dinner.  All I wanted during the entire trip were crab legs and boy did I get them here!  These were the best crab legs I’ve had in a long time! 

While we were eating, a huge amount of rainfall fell and actually flooded the street outside our restaurant.  In fact, we weren’t able to get into the parking lot where we parked our car because we would have had to wade in about 2 feet of water.  Thank goodness for our parking attendant because we were able to toss him our car keys and he drove the car out for us.

After a very busy day, we gladly headed back to our room to get some much needed rest.  All-in-all, it was a fun day with my favorite travel partner.