Day 3 in Charleston

Our first stop today was the docks at the National Parks system.  From here you bought tickets and took a 30 minute ride to Fort Sumter.  You had an hour to walk around then a 30 minute ride back.  This was an interesting story to hear.  Being in the South, and learning about their history is different than it was for us Yankees who won that war.
Here is what Fort Sumter looked like when it was build.  Three stories high.

Here is what is left of Fort Sumter, one story of wall on the outside and not much on the inside.

 We saw lots of canons and were told that it took 5 men to operate on cannon.

 Here is a photo from the second story grass area showing an inner wall with canons. We learned that one type of canon they had could shoot 5.5 miles!  Who would have believed.

This is a most unusual bridge in Charleston.

 Here is the captain of the ship bringing us into the harbor.

 Second stop was the Aquarium which was right next door to the Fort Sumter monument building.

 I came around the corner to this exhibit and saw this guy.  Scared me for sure.  Although I learned that they breathe with their mouths open and that's why people think they are aggressive because they show their teeth as they breathe.

 Check out this turtle, he was doing the H for OHIO! LOL

 This was a very cool pool of horseshoe crabs and sting rays.  In a smaller pool, Tim and I got to hold live star fish, hermit crabs and sea urchins.  I felt like a little kid doing this.  I'd never done this before.  Any time we'd been around things like this it was with kids and they were the ones touching things.

The last thing we did today was walk the streets of downtown Charleston.  On our tour we learned after the war the city had to be rebuilt.  They had lots of clay and plenty of help from the plantations to make bricks.  Bricks were considered a poor man's building material so many of the houses had spackling put over the brick and lines were drawn to make them look like stone or wood.

 The homes are magnificent!  There are very wealthy people here.  Check out this three-story home in pink.  We figured that many people were employed in this city just taking care of all of the million dollar homes and landscaping.

 Check out this home....Many of the homes we saw were surrounded by high fences or high shrubs so people couldn't see in.  It seemed sad to me that these people and their money had cut themselves off from us commoners.....

 This is rainbow lane where the houses are all colored different colors and in a row.

There is a lot of money in this city. They used a lot of rot iron on homes as well.  The homes and buildings have special pieces put into them for earth quakes as they experienced a 7.7 earthquake which destroyed a lot of the city.  Many homes here are protected by the historical society so owners have to keep them looking a certain way.  We were told taxes on these houses were 5% of what they are worth!

Blessing of the Day: Spending time with Tim and learning so much about this great city.

Thanks for stopping by.

Blessings,