We bid good-bye to Aaron and Erin and headed for Congaree, South Carolina, a national park established only a few years ago. We did a walking tour of the swamp before heading to Charleston on the coast. We arrived at dusk and unfortunately had only a couple hours anyway, but it’s a peculiar little place. The historic district is genteel and very pretty but seems stuck in a time a couple centuries ago, and you sort of expect to turn the corner and meet women in hoop skirts heading to the harbor to watch the shelling of Fort Sumter. It’s a place we’d like to spend more time in the future, so we’ve added it to the list of future vacation spots. We then camped in a state park down the coast. Like Virginia, we paid $30 for the night, which really is not that much less than a cheap motel, but at least the campsite was nice.
On the advice of Aaron and Erin, on the way out of NC I bought a book called Confederates in the Attic. This Pulitzer Prize winning author travels around the south, visiting Civil War battlefields and interviewing Civil War re-enactors and crazy pro-Confederates. The book is great so far, but I was a bit put off by the fact that it was on the shelf of a major bookstore (though luckily not one of the national chains) beside a book entitled "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War" which espouses such views as the fact that slavery wasn't actually so bad and that the South actually held the moral high ground over the North. So yeah, welcome back to the south.
- M
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