a little rain won't slow us down

So here we are in Charleston, actually the Isle of Palms, where the weather was perfect before we arrived and is supposed to return to perfect just about the time we take off on Sunday. Nevermind, we can do pretty much everything we had planned (except sitting on the beach) in the rain. As you know from my previous post, we are staying with Kelly in her most adorable beach house here. Her parents live a few miles away in Mt Pleasant and her sister lives just a few blocks away on the island. The whole family decided to move here a few years ago from Maryland. Isn't that cool? I used to be their babysitter and have just kept in touch over the years.

Thursday we started the evening off at Crave where we had to have a Sweet Tea-ni made with Charleston's unique Firefly Sweet Tea vodka. Tasted just like sweet iced tea - absolutely delish!! So, there's a story behind the Firefly Sweet Tea vodka. Kelly mailed a bottle of it to me for ACL weekend. Only it exploded in my hot mailbox so only the geckos who live in there got to enjoy it. You can't buy it in Texas and it sounded like such a great thing that I wanted to buy a bottle to carry back to Austin so we had to go to Crave to learn how to make Sweet Tea-ni's with it when I get home.

After Crave we went over to Kelly's sister Michelle's house for their Mom Jo's homemade gumbo - two varieties - regular and landlubbers (for Mike since he is allergice to shellfish).


Friday there was a brief period of time where it was not raining so we hit the beach to read our books. The water was warm - still about 75! You'd never know it, but there were big gray clouds on either side of this blue part of the sky.



We decided to stay on the islands (Isle of Palms and Sullivan's) for the evening. We started off at Poe's for a few drinks before dinner. Poe's is named after Edgar Allen..who aparently spent the last days of his life here the Charleston area. All of the entrees are named after his books and there is a huge beetle in the front sidewalk.
For dinner, we had reservations at High Thyme just across the street. There was this wonderful Terrapin beer on the menu that Mike had in my honor (as a Maryland Terp) even tho it is brewed in Athens GA. Terrapins rock!!
This was our waitress, Emily. You can tell by looking at her that we had the best service.

After dinner we had to explore another bar in the area, Dunlevy's Pub. We wanted Mike to pose here, but he refused.

Around 11 we went to the Windjammer to listen to some live music - a cover band called Playlist. They played all this "great" 80's music that we were embarassed to admit we knew. It actually was a lot of fun, especially the people watching. We stayed out pretty late and then slept in until 10, which was just wonderful...and just in time to get up to watch the UT game at noon. More on Saturday tomorrow....