Unintentional Vacation
Part 5
Tuesday, October 8 was our last full day in Charleston. This was another day where we were on our own and doing our own thing, sticking around in Charleston awaiting any news that might come out of General Diesel that might determine if we were going home in 3426, or if we were taking the rental car home.
The day started out the same way that all of our other days in Charleston went: with the hotel breakfast. What I did was what often ends up happening with Elyse, where I go down for breakfast and then bring her a plate after I’m done. I admit that I was starting to get tired of the hotel breakfast after four days of it, but it came with the room, so I wasn’t about to look a complimentary breakfast in the mouth. Elyse wanted me to make “Breakfast Cars” for her, after an Internet meme where people put flat breakfast foods on top of sausage links to make them somewhat resemble cars. The hotel had an automatic pancake machine, so that was the flat piece, however, they weren’t serving up sausage links on this particular day, instead serving the larger sausages that are cut into slices. For those not familiar with breakfasts at the express-tier Hilton properties like Hampton Inn or Tru, they tend to rotate through three different kinds of sausage options: links, patties, and the sliced sausages. So with the third one available to me, I did my best, and made “breakfast cars on blocks”. It wasn’t the full meme like Elyse wanted, but it worked well enough.
We left the hotel around noon, and checked completely out, on the off chance that the bus would be ready and we were able to hit the road, i.e. keeping things flexible. After leaving the hotel, our first stop was Low Country Harley-Davidson, i.e. the Harley dealership that had eluded us on our last trip, and which we had thought would elude us again. Clearly, fate wanted us to visit this Harley place, so who are we to argue? Elyse would finally get that poker chip for Charleston.
Going in, we looked around, and then got our poker chip. Interestingly enough, their POS system was down, so we had to pay in cash, and they gave us a handwritten receipt.
While we were there, we chatted with two of the employees about our trip and what we were doing down here, i.e. the bus and everything else. I don’t remember how we got there, but we came about discussing the /r/tragedeigh subreddit, which is about very interesting and/or creative spellings of common names. That led to one of the employees to mention that her name was Liberty. My first reaction was, “It’s not spelled ‘L-I-B-E-R-T-E-I-G-H‘ or something like that, is it?” Turned out that no, it was spelled just like freedom, as in, “liberty and justice for all”. I’d heard of Liberty as a middle name before, so it’s not entirely out of the blue, but still uncommon. As the conversation progressed, Liberty revealed that she was from Maryland, and more specifically, Cecil County, or, “Ceciltucky”, as she referred to it. She also gave us a tip: there was a chain of convenience stores in the Charleston area called Parker’s Kitchen, which is nearly identical to the Royal Farms stores that we have all over the place at home. She said that it’s the same basic store design, same color scheme, same everything. We both found that interesting, so we would make sure to check that out.
Leaving the Harley dealership, we went to the North Charleston Fire Museum. That was a museum all about firefighting, and it was very accessible to all, with things for the kids to do, and lots of content for the adults as well. We both had a good time. The museum staff was entirely comprised of active or retired firefighters, so everyone was very knowledgeable. We spent about two hours there, and we had a great time seeing all of the vintage equipment on display and looking at all of the other exhibits.
An 1857 Button & Blake Hand Pumped Fire Engine.
1904 American LaFrance Cosmopolitan Steamer.
1911 American LaFrance “Type 8” Roadster.
1912 American LaFrance “Metropolitan” steamer.
A 1919 Ford-American LaFrance Model T Chemical Car.
A 1926 American LaFrance “Type 75” Triple Combination.
A 1932 American LaFrance “Type 245” pumper.
A 1940 American LaFrance 500 Series Pumper.
Fire hydrant dedicated in memory of fallen firefighters.
This was an automated demonstration on a stage showing all of the different kinds of potential fire hazards in a house.
This was a fire truck simulator. The was that this worked was that you went inside and then sat in the driver’s seat. You then moved the wheel and the pedals while a movie of a fire response in Dallas, Texas was projected onto the windshield (the projector is out of frame to the top left). Note, however, that your actions on the wheel and pedals didn’t change anything on the movie.
Classic Gamewell fire alarm telegraph station.
The building fire alarm, a Simplex t-bar, mounted on the wall next to an emergency exit. Just like at the Transit Museum in New York, it has a Stopper cover on it, as well as a warning that this is the actual fire alarm and not part of the exhibit. I suspect that I know exactly what made this sign necessary.
One thing that amused me was when I got to the section on arson fires. What does it say that I immediately started looking to see if my photo of the Skyline Parkway Motel was there? Clearly, I know what works of mine tend to get traction, but in this case, it wasn’t there. And that is fine, because there are lots of arsons besides that one example.
We also played their trivia punch card game, where you picked up a punch card at the entrance to the museum, and then you answered ten different multiple choice trivia questions by punching a hole in your card at little stations located throughout the museum. It was a lot of fun, and I scored nine out of ten.
While we were at the fire museum, I checked in with the folks at General Diesel. As it would turn out, no, the bus would not be ready on Thursday, but no worries – that just meant that our plan to have a fun day in Charleston would continue unabated, and we would check in with them again tomorrow.
In the lobby, that apostrophe in the Visitors’ Center sign made both of us cringe a little bit.
Elyse poses with a replica palmetto tree in the lobby.
After the fire museum, we went to a nearby Wendy’s. This was the first day of the SpongeBob SquarePants cross-promotion, and Elyse wanted to get the Krabby Patty combo. That consisted of a Wendy’s single burger with a special sauce on it, a medium order of fries, and a pineapple flavored Frosty.
Krabby Patty promotional poster at the entrance to the Wendy’s.
Error message about an improperly licensed system on the outer screen of the point of sale terminal. However, this message did not seem to affect the operation of the terminal otherwise.
We both got the SpongeBob order, and it was… eh. I’m not a huge Wendy’s fan to begin with, as it’s just not really my thing, and that is fine. That said, I wasn’t overly impressed by the SpongeBob tie-in, but I’m also a little biased because Wendy’s isn’t my groove to begin with. If it tells you anything, if I had to choose amongst the “mainstream” burger places, I would probably go with Burger King.
While we were at Wendy’s, we also recognized that it was starting to get later in the day, and that we definitely weren’t going home on Thursday. So I booked another night at the Tru, where we had been staying for much of the last week. Considering that this would be our third time checking into the hotel and therefore our third room, I jokingly said to Elyse that we were “sleeping around”, in the sense that we were sleeping all around the fourth floor of that place. However, unlike before, this was definitely going to be our last night.
Leaving Wendy’s, we headed towards downtown, as Elyse wanted to go to the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore. I wasn’t particularly interested in looking through a Habitat store where I couldn’t really bring anything home, so I just sat on one of the couches while Elyse poked around. Fortunately, it happened that the Habitat store was on a bus route, so after finishing at the store, we photographed a few CARTA buses passing by. I figured, even if we couldn’t get shots of our CARTA bus in action, we could at least get some photos of other CARTA buses.
Bus 3509, a 2010 New Flyer D40LFR, running the 10 route towards Rivers Avenue.
Bus 4502, a 2019 Proterra Catalyst, also running the 10 route.
Bus 4000, a 2013 New Flyer XDE40, also running the 10 route, and sporting a full-body advertising wrap.
On the way to the Habitat store, I had previously noticed a cargo ship, the Thalatta, docked at the port. Now, as we headed towards the waterfront, I noticed that the Thalatta was underway. I had wanted to photograph this ship, so I busted a move. I parked, grabbed the drone, headed to a clearing, powered everything up, and got that drone up in the air as quickly as I could, because I wanted photos of that ship. I made a valiant effort to catch up to it, but unfortunately, the ship was just a little bit faster than my drone, so I ended up discontinuing the mission and bringing it back towards shore when I realized that my little drone would never catch up to the ship.
The Thalatta departs Charleston, at a faster speed than I could fly, unfortunately.
So I failed to get the photos of this ship, but that’s okay. You win some and you lose some, and I realized that with the Thalatta, I could have gone irrecoverably out to sea and still never caught up to it. Besides, there are plenty of other ships to photograph in a port city like Charleston, and there was no real significance to the Thalatta other than that it just happened to be there. So I went around and found some other things to photograph while the drone was still up in the air.
The barge CMT Y Not 8 is pushed up the Cooper River by the tugboat Helen.
The USS Yorktown, an Essex-class aircraft carrier that has been permanently moored in Mount Pleasant since 1975, and now operates as a museum ship.
A quick glimpse of the Ravenel Bridge after departing the USS Yorktown.
A powerboat travels toward the Charleston Harbor Marina.
Sandbar adjacent to Shute’s Folly Island.
Castle Pinckney, a small masonry fortification constructed in 1810 by the federal government at the south end of Shute’s Folly Island. The flag flying over the fortification is the Honor and Remember flag.
I was surprised about how many birds I spotted hanging out on the island. However, I didn’t stick around long after they started moving, because I didn’t want to risk a collision with any of them.
Leaving Shute’s Folly Island, I then spotted a ship with big sails, and went in to investigate.
That ship turned out to be the Pride, a three-mast schooner available for sightseeing cruises.
I then spotted another tour boat, the Carolina Belle.
The last boat that I captured was the Watertoy, a party boat operated by Captain Cocktail Cruises.
The last thing that I captured before bringing the drone back in was 2 Concord Street, a house built on concrete pilings entirely over the water.
One thing that I noticed after reviewing the photos later was that in the case of all three of the tour boats, by the end of my time with each of them, my drone had attracted the attention of some of the patrons on the boat, and there were a bunch of people watching it. I suppose that with a drone, it’s inevitable sometimes, but I prefer to capture people just doing their thing, and not all staring directly into the camera.
But all, in all, I didn’t do too badly. I also made a note of a pineapple fountain that looked interesting, and I wanted to come back to that once it got dark to do some night photography with the tripod.
While I was flying my drone over by the waterfront, Elyse checked out some of the shops along Vendue Range. There was a restaurant, a gelato shop, a gift shop, and a hotel. Don’t ask me how it happened, but Elyse ended up with practically an entire vegetable tray for free. I don’t even ask anymore, because Elyse just has a way about these things, and the vegetables were tasty.
I’ve never seen a sign be this blunt about service animals. Basically, real service animals are welcome, but don’t bring your pets in and pretend that they’re service animals.
Elyse holds a Jellycat peanut plush. We didn’t get this little guy today, but Elyse did eventually acquire one just like it a few months later.
Finishing up over there, Elyse and I looked for a place to charge up the rental car for free. The way that I figured, this was a plug-in hybrid vehicle, so we might as well see how that goes. We eventually located a free charging station at a Publix store in the 10 WestEdge apartment complex, in the Publix garage. So we parked at one of the charging stations, popped the charging port open, and plugged up. We got two hours of free parking, so we let it charge for the two hours. I grabbed my computer and took a break, while Elyse explored around the store. Getting back to the car, we found that we had gotten about a 60% charge on the battery, which wasn’t as much as I’d wanted, but it was enough to see what I wanted to see.
After the grocery store, now that it was dark outside, we went back to the waterfront. We again parked on the street, and Elyse and I parted company for a while. I went to go photograph the pineapple fountain, while Elyse hit up a bar. That worked, because that meant that Elyse would be entertained while I was photographing.
When I got to the pineapple fountain, I was disappointed to find out that the pineapple part at the top of the fountain, i.e. the important part, was not lighted in any way. So the bottom two-thirds of the fountain was well-lit, and the top third might as well have been missing completely.
The pineapple fountain. All I can say is that I tried.
I suppose that I made a valiant effort, but this one was ultimately a bust. I also photographed another fountain near the entrance to the park, and those results were similarly poor. Considering that I liked a lot of the other stuff that I had done in Charleston, I wasn’t mad.
The fountain at the entrance to Waterfront Park, which also photographed poorly.
A photo of the tripod in front of the fountain. I feel like this shot came out better than the actual photos of the fountain.
Clearly, it was just not my night as far as photography went. On the way back to the car to put my real camera and tripod away, I noticed a place called The Monogram, which was slated to open in the fall of 2020. Looking through the window, I saw an incomplete space.
Signage at the Monogram, advertising an opening in the fall of 2020.
The very incomplete interior of the Monogram.
Something tells me that this was planned with the best of intentions, but unfortunately, it seems that the Ronies got them, as I can only assume that all of the disruptions caused by the pandemic response put the brakes on this effort and led to a stillborn venue.
Once Elyse finished at the bar and we all got back to the car, we started making our way back towards the hotel. We had to check in one more time, after all, and it was after 10 PM. On the way back to the hotel, we found a Parker’s Kitchen location on Sam Rittenberg Boulevard, and we discovered that Liberty was spot on with her assessment: Parker’s Kitchen is very much in the same vein as Royal Farms, with the same basic store design, same color scheme, and the same overall feel.
The front of Parker’s Kitchen.
Shelving and drink coolers at Parker’s Kitchen.
Foodservice area at Parker’s Kitchen. However, unlike at Royal Farms, the foodservice part of the store was not open 24 hours.
Soda fountain at Parker’s Kitchen.
Parker’s Kitchen cups, with the same color scheme as Royal Farms.
And then we returned to the hotel. One thing that I noticed on this particular evening was the way that the hotel’s clientele had changed. When I arrived on Friday night, the place was mostly full of kids and their parents for a soccer event that was going on somewhere in Charleston. The kids all left on Sunday, and then Sunday night and Monday night were pretty unremarkable. But now, on Tuesday night, it was mostly people who had come up from Florida ahead of the expected arrival of Hurricane Milton. Among other things, there were a lot more pets than on previous nights, as people, understandably, brought their animals with them when it was time to evacuate. After all, they’re family, too. The evacuees from Florida were really nice, and the dogs were cute, too.
Meanwhile, the lady working the front desk was surprised to see us checking in once again, since we had initially intended to leave on Monday, and then checked completely out again on Tuesday on the possibility that we would have the bus on Tuesday. This time, I assured her that this was the last night, and that we were definitely going home on Wednesday, bus or not.
Otherwise, we knew the drill at the Tru. We went in, we brought our stuff in, and that was that. We had a pretty easy night, and then the next day, we would travel home.