Charleston Final Thoughts

I highlighted our hotel, the French Quarter Inn and Bocci’s Italian Restaurant, in previous posts, but I wanted to highlight a few other things with our trip to Charleston. We made most of our moves by foot. However, there was a free trolley that operated down in the historic district, but we found the timetable never had the trolley cars in the area we were in at the right time and it was easier just to walk. We did take a tour of the bay area by just riding the water taxi round-trip. We had thought about getting off at the Charleston Harbour Resort, but once we were there it didn’t look that exciting and the crew told us it was a mile from the resort to anything on Mt. Pleasant to eat other than the restaurant at the resort.  The taxi stopped at Patriot’s Point where there is an aircraft carrier you can tour, but since we’d just toured Midway in San Diego we decided to skip this as well.  On our afternoon trip on the taxi we enjoyed the bay, but we did not see any dolphins. Thinking that we couldn’t travel to the East Coast without having seafood we tried out two different restaurants in our budget. I’m not a huge seafood eater so we didn’t go to Hank’s Seafood which appeared to be a much more upscale eatery. Instead we had lunch one day at A.W. Shucks where the food was edible, but nothing to write home about. This place reminded me of Joe’s Crab Shack. Another afternoon we tried out Hyman’s Seafood ttp://www.hymanseafood.com/. This place had ads on all of the tourism guides for a free crab dip appetizer and we’d walked by it several times. On our last afternoon, we decided to stop in here and give it a try. The free crab dip was very disappointing. I tried the Carolina Shrimp and Grits. I ordered an appetizer portion as I wasn’t very hungry. Carolina style comes with a parmesan cheese sauce on the grits. It was basically something I felt that I should try since I’d read so much about shrimp and grits being a southern specialty. While it was somewhat tasty, I cannot say that I would rush out to get it again.
That last night we had the wine and cheese at the hotel and decided to forget about dinner and head to Kaminsky’s, www.kaminskys.com, a wine and dessert bar.  Here the husband ordered a Cappuccino Float and I ordered a Berry Cobbler which was a large dessert served in a French Onion-type soup crock. I was only able to finish part of this and took the rest back to our room for a late night snack.
We ended our trip in Charleston the next morning.  We were sorry to leave this lovely area, but happy to be getting home.  At the time, we didn’t realize how much the rest would get us ready for the busy next few weeks with our son and his sudden move for his job.