Charleston, city of ghosts, or at least it seems that way.
There’s been pirates and wars and fires and stuff, and the city is quite proud
of flaunting its history. I went for a walk after my shower, and headed for one
of the many attractions laid out on the tourist map, which was the aquarium. It
was less than five minutes away, big and impressive looking and boasting a
large collection of aquatic animals, as an aquarium must. I was quite keen on
going in and looking about, until I saw that the entrance fee was twenty-four
dollars and change, which was about as much as I had in my pocket. I decided
that was a little ridiculous and ran for a trolley instead.
In Charleston the trollies are free and the busses are not,
so I took a trolley intent on finding a horse drawn tour of the historic city,
which seemed nice. That being said I had no idea where to find this horse drawn
tour, or where this trolley was going, so I sat back and enjoyed the ride, it
was air conditioned after all. The trolley also had brass plated poles with
swirls like the ones you find on carousels, it was quite nice. When the trolley
stopped, I asked the driver where I might find the horses and their tour and he
directed me to take another trolley and get off at market square.
The trolley I required was not there but the Charleston
Historic Museum was, and I was just about to pop around that and see how much
entrance cost when my trolley showed up, and I decided having a historic tour
would be the more enjoyable way to learn about Charleston’s history. So I
hopped on the trolley and spent a quiet, mostly uneventful public transit ride
to market street.
Market street was cobbled and old looking, and right away I
spotted a horse drawn carriage like the one that I wanted to take. I decided it
was in my best interest to follow it so I could find the place where they sold
the tickets and if by some accident I ended up walking most of the tour then I
wouldn’t have the pay the price of the ticket and that was that. As it turns
out the carriage was near the end of the tour and I found the ticket booth
fairly easily. However, the ticket booth was right next to the market square
which was a series of rectangular buildings dividing the road in two. That
looked more interesting than a crowded carriage with a man yelling things over
a microphone so I went in there.
Apart from a few people weaving baskets and other things it
was just like any ‘market’ you might find with jewellery stalls, some places
selling plastic watsits and toys, and a few places selling jams and other
jarred goods. Civil war toys and figures seemed to be pretty prevalent and I
almost bought one but I didn’t know for the life of me who wore the blue
jackets and who wore the grey ones so I didn’t get any.
After wandering through the market and being notably
underwhelmed I decided to go back out onto the street and go back to the
carriage tours but once again I got side-tracked by a shop in a small street
called ‘The Tea and Spice Exchange’ however once I reached it I decided I
probably had enough tea, and walked right past it. Past it was a shop I did go
into called ‘The Old Ghost Shop’ or something like that. I went in and was
confronted by pirate flags, a whole shelf of ghost stories and then a bunch of
incense, Celtic charms, fairies and other supernatural stuff. The man behind the counter was very nice and
we talked a lot about pirates and how Blackbeard had barricaded the harbour
with The Gentleman Pirate and much of a bastard Edward Low was exactly. As a
small note Blackbeard is Edward
Teach, and Edward Low is another person entirely (they’re easy to confuse
because both are named Edward and are pirates. Blackbeard however, wasn’t a
psychopathic madman, he was mostly just scary looking). I ended up buying Edward Low’s flag, as he
was a childhood favourite of mine, commonly referred to as ‘that pirate who cut
off some dudes lips, boiled them and made him eat them’ which was all I knew
about him when I was little.
Edward Low's Flag
After that I wandered through the French Quarter, which is
also the ‘Historic District’ and found one of the oldest houses, cobblestones streets
and other interesting things which plaques stuck on them. Then I faced the
challenge of finding my way back to the boat, which wasn’t that hard since I
had a map. On the way back I noted some likely looking restaurants and arrived
to the boat, where I spent a little while reading as much as I could about
pirates. I ended up finding a forty page paper called ‘Pirational Choice: The
economics of Infamous Pirate Practices’ which is really quite good.
We went out for dinner that evening and past the pub I had
seen earlier called Molly O’something or other, and walked a few more blocks so
we could see what else there was. My legs kinda hurt after my afternoon wander
and so I was a little put out afterwards when we decided to go to the pub I
noticed earlier which was the first restaurant we passed. The waitress there
was nice and the food was good. Everyone had fish and chips, and we sat next to
a poster which illustrated ‘The gentle art of making Guinness’ which was
amusing as they had all sorts of strange machines and said they delivered the
beer by dropping it out of hot air balloons onto villages. It was a quiet
night, except for the moment I forgot myself and belched very loudly, luckily
the pub was close to empty and nobody really seemed to take offence (that or
they were too embarrassed that I dare do such a thing that they couldn’t call
me on it).
The next morning we set off, left Charleston and were back
to bobbing about down waterways best described as ‘a stretch of water with
vegetation on both sides and sometimes a house’. Quite honestly I don’t
remember a lot of the details. We
anchored in mosquito creek that evening, which was sort of a marshy place and
was, for most of the evening, devoid of mosquitoes. That being said when they
did come out they were these nasty little black things faster than mosquitoes
in Canada. Not to mention their bites hurt and swell into little red welts.
Skull Island was the next anchorage after that, and was
very, very underwhelming. It was the time when we started to see a marked
increase in palm trees but other than that it was just another stretch of
densely foliaged wilderness.
After Skull Island we anchored in Big Tom Creek where there
was a really nasty thunderstorm. We had to put the electronics that would fit
in the oven so they wouldn’t fry if we got hit by lighting, since we were the
tallest things around by virtue of the large metal pole sticking out of the
boat. Luckily for us the storm didn’t
last long and soon past us by.
The days by this point were becoming sweltering, and as
aforementioned there were an awful lot of palm trees. The houses were also
getting bigger, but thankfully most of them were less tacky than the ones we
had seen before, except for one that was painted bright turquoise. We crossed
John’s river, or something with a name similar the next day and anchored in
alligator river which isn’t the same alligator river as the one we anchored in
before. I spent that day looking forward to the one after it because Grandma said
that there was an old island called Cumberland island that had wild horses on
it and ruins of houses and poisonous snakes.
It was with high hopes and hiking boots at the ready that I
woke up the next morning, only to find, later on that the winds were all wrong
for Cumberland Island and we couldn’t anchor. So we pressed on which had the benefit
of putting us within a one days sail to St. Augustine which is the oldest city
on the continent.
The next day, as planned we got to St. Augustine though it
was a bit late, so we decided to go to shore the next day and spend the day
exploring and stocking up. I looked over the maps and such for the city and
noted a few places I wanted to go, namely the pirate museum and the Lightner
Museum which used to be a hotel. There was also a fort built by the Spanish out
of shell stone (which as far as I can tell is basically concrete with shells in
it but I’m probably wrong) that seemed like it was worth a gander.
I went to fort first and balked when I saw that it had an
entrance fee (the fort in Charleston did not have an entrance fee, you just had
to get there) and I wasn’t all that keen on seeing it when I had other things
on the agenda. So I walked around the outside of it and to the pirate museum
which was across the street. I puttered around in the gift shop there for a
while looking at replica pistols and lots of things with the skull and cross
bones emblazoned on them.
I went in eventually and was at the back of a school group
being led by a man dressed like a pirate with a very loud voice. It was neat
and I learned some things that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise (namely that
after drilling a hole in the head for skull surgery you nailed a silver dollar
to the hole). Happily though, the group soon disbanded which meant I could read
the plaques and look at the very good wax models in peace.
They had instrumentation, a really jolly roger and loot they
had brought up from a sunken ship there, not to mention a room where you could
learn to tie knots and ‘fire’ a replica cannon and pistol. The disembodied wax
head of Blackbeard told you about the life and times of Edward Teach who was
only a pirate for three years. At the end of the museum there was a room with
things from movie pirates, including Jack Sparrow’s collapsing sword which was
the center piece. It wasn’t a very big museum
all things considered. It only took me
around an hour to wander through and gawk and read all there was to read
including the computerized book with short biographies of notable pirates of
the area.
After that I decided to walk about in a slow meander towards
the Lightner Museum. I went down Spanish Street, which is this street done the
way the old city used to be as sort of a Spanish town. It was nice but I didn’t
stay on it long as I got side-tracked down a little cobblestone alley that had
a one man band in it who wasn’t playing anything. We stayed and talked awhile
about nothing in particular and I left when he started playing as I still had
things to see and it was starting to get on.
The Lightner Museum was only a few blocks away and had
really nice gardens with little brown lizards everywhere. The lobby was beautiful
with mosaicked floors and pillars and stuff. I talked to the lady and she let
me get in for the college student price, despite the fact I didn’t have a
college student ID (or any ID on me at all). The first floor was absolutely
magnificent, there was a music room, a ‘science and technology room’ with a
collection of native American artefacts, a blown glass steam engine and a
stuffed lion, along with tonnes of other things. There was also a ‘model village’ which was a
bunch of glass cases with little set ups in them like a child’s room, or a
barber shop or an emporium.
After the first floor though things quickly got less
impressive. The second floor was not as nicely done as the first and mainly
featured collections of ceramics and cut glass. The building had linoleum and
areas where the pools had been had been were concreted in and there were little
boards that endeavoured to tell you what they ought to have looked like.
There was a ‘ballroom gallery’ but it didn’t look much like
a ballroom at all, and just had little alcoves with some random furniture and a
chandelier. There was also the third floor which was reserved for more furniture,
cigar label art, buttons, and embroidery samplers. Some of it was neat but most
of it was underwhelming as I was hoping that the rest of the museum would have
at least some of the opulence of the lobby.
On the way out I browsed the gift shop which had nothing I
deemed spending money on and I considered walking to a shop and buying ice cream
but my feet hurt and I decided it was much more preferable to walk over the
park and lay on the grass in the shade. I’m pleased to say that is exactly what
I did. It was very nice even if the grass did prickle a bit. Eventually though
I got to hot and walked back to the marina where I convinced the water taxi to
take me out to the boat before his next scheduled run.
From there, I lounged about and did nothing. We were going
to go out for dinner that evening but there were foul weather reports so we
stayed in, and that worked out alright because there was a thunderstorm. There
were some really nice forked lightning strikes, luckily nowhere near the boat
so they were pretty to watch. Also Grandma and Grandpa bought me a camera to
replace my old one, which was really super nice of them. It takes great
pictures and does some panorama stuff, which I think ought to turn out very
good.
A little Panorama
From Saint Augustine we’ve come down to Hobe Sound which
took us five days. There hasn’t been anything terribly notable about those five
days. There’s been big houses, and pelicans and other sorts of things that I’ve
written about before and haven’t the mind to write about again. There has been
no more of the big biting flies but lots of mosquitoes. Grandma says Grandpa
looks like he’s got the measles and I can’t move about without knocking into
one of my own (I have one on each wrist just to make typing fun). The nights have been muggy and hard to fall asleep
in but with the tropical storm giving us high winds it looks like perhaps we
get a reprieve if we keep the hatches open.
As far as new wildlife I’ve seen jellyfish and what I
thought was an ibis when we made a short stop to change the gas tank in the dingy
as the old one wouldn’t close properly. The best thing that happened though is
when I was sitting on the bow watching us chase small fish about (they seem to
think they could outrun the boat and then dart off suddenly to the side when
they realize they can’t) when a white shape comes out from under the boat and
scares me half to death. I pull my feet in and realize that it’s a dolphin, a
super close dolphin. Then another dolphin joined it and another one after that.
I was really hoping they’d break the water and play in the bow wave and be
generally awesome but after a few seconds they slipped out of sight. Grandma also saw a manatee but it was
submerged when I got there so I never got to see it. Still, we’re going through
manatee zones so there is hope.
The plan now is to get to a marina in the next few days to
stock up and then nip across the gulf on Wednesday when the winds are right. So
until then we’re back to waiting but that’s alright. Adventure awaits!
No comments:
Post a Comment