Dolson November Tour: Day 5 (Charleston/Wilmington)

So. . .Charleston. What a town! I had the most fun in Charleston that I’ve had in all of the cities I’ve been to, but it wasn’t all just about the town. I’ll just give you a run down of my time in Charleston as best I can.

You already know about my volleyball playin, and my fountain climbing, so I’ll start on Wednesday night.

Since I didn’t have anything booked in town I decided to try my networking skills and head downtown to find some places to play. The whole night was this crazy serendipitous unfolding. I was eating at this place called Johnson’s. They’re one of the venues that brings in bands from out of town. So I’m sitting at the bar, and these two girls sit down next to me. We ended up talking. The one knew a whole bunch of venue owners, and they both knew the band playing that night, so they got me up to play a few songs, totally unplanned. It was great.

So Thursday was the most adventurous day of the whole tour, maybe even the year.
I got up early to drive Rachel’s friend to the airport so I got to catch the Charleston sunrise.


Rachel and I caught the geocaching bug from our find the day before so we made a point to check out the geocaching.com site and find some caches nearby.

I think the pictures tell a better story than I ever will, so I’ll post those.

This was the path to our first official cache hunt. We looked everywhere before rereading the hints and realized that we needn’t search anywhere but near the dock. Oh well, the anticipation made the find all the more exciting!

Rachel spotted the cache first.

look how excited i was!

rachel was even more excited!….actually i think she makes that face in every picture.

Geocaching would probably be the most fun family adventure, especially for younger kids. Why you ask? well, when you find it, you get a prize that someone before you left inside. In return, you leave something for the next lucky geocachers.

you always have to leave a note, with your names and the date you found the cache.

their was a disposable camera in the cache. I took another shot with my camera, but this is pretty much the shot that proves we found the cache.

We found a web cam cache on the Citadel’s campus. The citadel is a military style school. All the boys where uniforms and address their superiors as sir, but they’re not active duty military. Anyways there was a cach set up where you log onto a website and you can control one of the cameras on the roof of the dorms. You pan, tilt, zoom, and snap a photo of yourself standing there. It was fun, but a little creepy when you think about it.

You can see the camera in the upper left of this photo right above the palm tree. After the Citadel cache we decided to get lunch at a local joint Lenny’s. Mom was cooking in the back, and daughter was running the cash register. This was some real down home cookin’, and it filled us up. The sweet corn bread did me in.


Asia was the daughters name, and apparently she was looking for a photographer, so her mom came out to give us some contact info when she saw us taking pictures.

Back at Rachel’s porch we met Marsell when she stopped by asking for food. Rachel and Stephanie made her some sandwiches and packed her some water. She sat down and started talking with us and then she started to fall asleep. I don’t think she was well, and she must have been dehydrated, but she wouldn’t drink the water or let us take her anywhere. She eventually got up and wandered down the street. I hope she’s ok.

We did one more cache before I left for Wilmington. The last one was easy, but we came up with the unofficial street symbol for geocaching. It looks something like this.

Then, yes, ther’s still more! We rode our bikes up the Ravenel Bridge across the Cooper River.

We rode our bikes 2.5 miles uphill. It was intense on the way up, but we got to see the sun sitting low in the sky over the Charleston skyline.

On the way down we cheared on a highschool cross country team with a bike horn and high fives.

Then it was time to leave Charleston :(

wheww. That’s alot for one post. I’ll have to catch you up to where I am tomorrow, but I will tell you that right now, at this very moment, I am at the Evening Muse in Charlotte, NC, and this has been my favorite room to play thus far.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll talk to ya’ll tomorrow.