Day 2.51: Charleston, SC

We woke up at Daphne’s and had a quick breakfast at home before driving straight downtown a parking garage that was $2 an hour, which seemed like a pretty good rate. We had planned to go to the Confederate Museum but saw that it was basically one large room of artifacts, which didn’t seem terribly interesting to us. We chose instead to explore the Historic Charleston City Market and stopped again at both Byrd’s Famous Cookies and Savannah Bee Company for numerous samples.

We walked through the cool streets about a mile and a half to Gnome Café, a vegan restaurant far from the historic downtown. Locals definitely wouldn’t walk that far, and our trip did take us through some deserted streets, but we enjoyed exploring. The small café had a nice vibe to it, and the food was decent. Arielle wasn’t in love with her portabella mushroom BLT, mainly because the mushrooms weren’t even pretending to be bacon, but it was good as a mushroom-lettuce-tomato sandwich. Abe, on the other hand, really liked his cinnamon pancakes and found his side of mushroom bacon to be disappointingly mushroom-like. The potatoes were good even with the unfortunate presence of peppers already mixed in.

Arielle found us a less sketchy route to walk back towards Marion Square, where we wandered around the park a bit. Abe brought Arielle into a cookie place where he had bought her little tiny mini-bagels with cream cheese on his last visit, but they apparently don’t carry those anymore. We also went across the street to Goorin Bros. Hat Shop, where Abe had purchased a Shabbat hat for Arielle last time we were there. Our next stop was at White House Black Market, where Arielle had seen a dress earlier that had caught her eye. After she finished, we raced back to the car to get our respective items and for Arielle to change her clothes. Arielle went to a meeting at KKBE, the local Reform synagogue, and Abe went to meet Shari, a friend who we saw just a few weeks earlier in Florida at Shosh and Eric’s wedding, at a coffee shop called Kudu.

After our respective appointments had ended, we met up and went to go get biscuits at Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit, which Arielle was very excited about. They were closing just a few minutes later, so we ate them in our car in an illegal parking spot right outside the market. We got a blackberry, a buttermilk, and a cinnamon sugar, which were tasty but hardly the best biscuits we’ve ever had.

We drove past Rainbow Row, which we had heard was cool but was a bit underwhelming, and Arielle dropped Abe off at a local Harris Teeter so that he could do some work while she drove to Synagogue Emanu-el, right near Daphne’s house, for a meeting. Abe got some TV watching and blogging done, and Arielle returned so that we could drive to dinner. We ate at Five Loaves Café, which was a great experience. Abe got vegan chili and tricolor tortellini, which contained far more pasta than tortellini and ravioli dishes usually do. Arielle got the half FLC Caesar (with cold tortellini) and a broccoli cheddar potato soup. It was a lot of food, so much so that Arielle didn’t even want dessert.

We went back to Daphne’s and she convinced us to watch the first episode of The West Wing, which Abe had seen before. We loaded our car so we would have less to do the next morning, and went to bed.

Approximate number of miles covered: 17