Mt. Pleasant, SC to Charleston, SC

13.4 mi / 10.7 mph / 214 ft. climbing
Home: YourPad Carriage House

Our push after yesterday’s crash left only 10 miles remaining to our three-night break in Charleston. Rett wasn’t exactly feeling great, and glad that we had done the 20 extra miles yesterday rather than today, but she’d at least be able to complete this final bit.

The short ride (and 4pm check-in at our vacation rental) meant that even with a 11am departure from our hotel, we had plenty of time to stop at REI (mainly for permetherin to reapply to our clothes now that we’re south enough that the mosquitos aren’t all winterdead), and then a second Trader Joe’s in Mt. Pleasant! With the historic and dense peninsula of Charleston being pretty hostile to cars and suburban sprawl, it appears that Mt. Pleasant here across the river absorbs a lot of that car-centric shopping demand. That’s part of why our final miles yesterday were such a pain in the ass, but with the chance to do a little research and detailed route-planning that I didn’t have time for yesterday, today’s route was complex and winding, but safe and easy, despite being intercut with the same (or worse) high-density vehicle as yesterday.

The iconic Ravenel bridge was only 5 years old when Dennis and I climbed it in 2010. Now nearly four times older, it still looks (and feels) quite modern. And it was nice to see that people haven’t gotten tired of using the separated pedestrian/bike path, mostly for sightseeing and exercise. After what’s felt like weeks riding through Dollar General, USA, the density of fit, attractive young people in this metropolitan area is almost disconcerting.

Rett riding up the Ravenel Bridge. The 5% grade was the biggest, steepest hill we’ve climbed in months (on its own enough to make today’s 16 feet-per-mile of climbing our highest since Long Island!), and a bit rude because if we’d been going the other direction we would have only had a 1-2% climb.

Cable: stay!

When the bridge’s bike path swept us gently down into Charleston proper, we still had plenty of time to kill, so we reversed northbound away from downtown through a relatively-gritty part of the city, the exact sort of alongside-the-tracks neighborhood that entrepreneurs in the 1990s leveraged to introduce craft beer to America. And in Charleston (unlike many other cities), this is where they still are! Munkle wasn’t yet open, so we just left our bikes there (after watching a guy crunch the rear end of his new Corvette on their building while trying to park), and walked over the tracks to Edmund’s Oast. The bar was packed with Arsenal fans watching their team draw with Chelsea, but we enjoyed our barrel-aged high-ABV flight in the outdoor redeveloped-industrial courtyard. We followed up with good Belgians at Munkle.

Edmund’s Oast, before we ordered our oddly-cheap $4 bread pudding dessert.

At the grocery store on the way to our rental, I heard customers and workers talking with each other in an English dialect I could barely understand. It seems unlikely that it would have been true Gullah, since I don’t know if there are enough speakers of that creole language left, but I’ve never heard such an unintelligible style of African-American English, so, maybe?

Day 2

It rained! Heavy enough to make some big puddles, so that’s the most rain we’ve seen in 50 days. “Seen”, not “felt”, since the forecast (and our crash two days before) had made this “stay inside and rest” day, with tomorrow being “explore Charleston” day.

The “main house” in front of our vacation rental. I wanted to stay in a place like this that had an iconic Charleston porch, but no reasonable ones were available.

Instead, we got the “carriage house” in back, which was almost as charming and Charleston-specific, but also our own complete space.

Inside our three-room, three-TV carriage house, from the spiral staircase (though romantic and enticing, the pain of going up and down old-peopled us into just sleeping in the downstairs bedroom).

Day 3

Initially disappointed that there had been nowhere to stay in the French Quarter, our place more to the northwest side of downtown Charleston had the advantage of “forcing” us to see more of the city as we walked to the French Quarter. Even two miles away from the most historically-dense core, nearly every house and business was still distinctly “Charleston”. Some of the 200-year-old houses in these outskirts were falling-over abandoned, some were fall-over well-maintained, and some weren’t even falling over at all. The mix meant there was no hint of “museum city” in this place that could easily be a museum city.

An unusually-unpainted house(?) near College of Charleston.

These arched chimney toppers are part of the style.

For some reason one of the College of Charleston buildings had these really-lifelike dinosaurs outside (with the palmettos helping to make the environment feel swamp-prehistoric.

The core of the College of Charleston isn’t quite Yale, but Yale doesn’t have trees this amazing!

“The Cistern” at the College of Charleston has light strings augmenting the Spanish Moss hanging from the live oaks, which somehow is not cheap and cheesy and ends up being quite amazing.

Luxury shops on King Street (including some more “boutique” brands in addition to the “mainstream” Guccis, Vuittons, etc.) finally brought an end to the long national nightmare that has plagued our entire ride down the Atlantic Coast! But seriously, it’s an interesting indicator revealing that Charleston has a combination of wealthy visitors and residents unequaled by any coastal city between here and New York. It may also be another way of seeing that there actually are no coastal cities between Charleston and New York City; all the other population centers we have passed through are merely overgrown beach resorts, places that modern transportation and building technology have allowed to grow, but nowhere that an 18th-century businessman would have even considered establishing a permanent operation.

We got a late breakfast at Millers All Day, surprisingly-bustling at 10:30am on a weekday even though the streets weren’t tourist-jammed. Then we continued on, connecting the dots Rett had placed on our Google Map of things we should see. That semi-random walk allowed us to stumble on a few of Charleston’s “hidden alleyways” without actively seeking them out, which was a pleasing way to make our overplanning feel spontaneous.

Jacob’s Alley brought us in the back door to this “discovery” of the graveyard at the Unitarian Church.

Charleston’s Unitarian Church and graveyard.

Jacob’s Alley, the narrow public pathway leading to secret spaces.

Trees and porches, two critical elements of living in Charleston prior to the invention of air-conditioning.

A rather pure example of the iconic “Charleston Single House” architecture. My favorite part is the solid front doors they all have. As if it will fool us into not realizing that the side is completely wide-open.

The Ravenel Bridge that we came over yesterday.

It had been pretty hot on the streets when we’d been unable to find shade, but when we reached the raised waterfront promenade, the trees and the sea-breeze made it almost chilly!

A non-standard but wonderful Old Charleston building in the French Quarter.

Rett needed to see the pink French Huguenot Church.

Philadelphia Alley, one that I specifically routed us to (but just getting there took us down more streets with more enticing scenes).

Gas lamps, greenery-draped brick, and trees shading hidden nooks put nearly the entire atmosphere of Charleston into this one alleyside back yard.

The narrow streets and old residences mean that Charleston is certainly the most “European”-feeling city we’ve been in. This small courtyard could be straight from France.

Rett noticed familiar Heritage Village Collection boxes in the window of this shop (the same boxes from her mom’s beloved Christmas collection await us in our storage unit). The buildings themselves (including this Harry Potter-themed one!) were laid out on tables, and that’s when we realized that this wasn’t a shop we were peeking into, it was just the house of a Christmas-loving family decorating for the holidays!

This mini-castle was sandwiched between a Wells-Fargo and another much-larger building, and of course overhung by a grand tree.

Dragon scales on the Circular Congregational Church.

Near the end of our long winding loop, we walked the length of the City Market, which was the first place where we saw a noticeable density of tourist-focused activity (more horse-driven carriages, pedal-driven carriages, t-shirt shops, etc.) While many of the people we’d seen walking the sidewalks were obviously tourists like us, for the most part the city just feels “real”. Certainly not NYC-like in terms of modern commerce, but less of a museum than Venice, and at least on this November weekday, a city that felt less-gawked-at than either of those places (except by us!)

In 2010, Dennis and I had spent one night in this city, and at that time it actually felt like we had seen more of it than most places. But in this single day of walking around, I think we literally saw 100 times more of the city. And even though we walked much of the length and width of the peninsula, we could easily spend another month living here, so that we could eventually walk every single block within that range. What I did know from that brief stop in 2010 is that it was one of the most-memorable places I had been (and not just on that bike tour). This deeper exploration only confirmed that feeling, so I’m glad that I hadn’t oversold it to Rett!

Another view of the glowing Spanish Moss draped over the College of Charleston.

The city is the first place in weeks that’s been big enough (and where we stayed long enough) to attempt a delivery to an Amazon locker. One of our items had been delivered, but then the rest were held up because the package locker was full (I made a ride there yesterday to pick up the item in the hopes of clearing space!) But now that we hadn’t gotten another update in two days, we were just going to have to let the rest of our items get automatically returned, and attempt another shipment further down the road. Another example that ordering stuff on the road is never as easy as we hope (that’s part of why it’s been a long time since we’ve even attempted this Amazon method).

But then! Just as we were approaching the check-out kiosk at Target, where Rett had been looking at a more-expensive brick-and-mortar replacement for one of the Amazon items, “buzz!” goes her phone. Our shipment had just been delivered, and we’re about to walk by the locker that’s now just a few blocks away. Success, barely!

One of our Amazon items was a new (red) keyboard for our Microsoft Surface Go 2, replacing the old (black) one. It wasn’t just cosmetics, the connection was going bad and I need to do very specific positioning to get it to work. I’m not too mad, the fact that it still had some life in it after 3+ years of road-living is the more remarkable thing!