11/27/15  Friday HAPPY BIRTHDAY Sharyl Webster!!

Forgot to share these photos from yesterday's passage of houses with long, long piers across the marshlands to the deep water.

Pier runs between the white dot on right to the house on left

more visible pier

The houses are modest but the expense of the piers that are tremendously long has to be fierce.

We stayed in port today, recovering from the arduous 3 hours of hard mental work getting across Charleston harbor, up Wapoo Creek, down Wapoo Creek, back across Charleston harbor, deciding to not anchor, searching for an open marina (it was Thanksgiving holiday, after all), and finally getting ourselves into the slip at Charleston Maritime Marina. So today we chilled!

Morning spent cleaning for ourselves and our visitors, showering (!joy!), laundry (!joy again), and David negotiated a dockage deal since there were no services yesterday and we hadn't used any power or facilities other than the dock.

Sybil and Michael, our dear friends from Rock Hill, SC, arrived around 10:30.

Michael and David did a construction project _David had asked Michael to bring some power tools to make the project do-able) and Syb and I finished the laundry. Then off to downtown (82 Queen St?) for a wonderfully delicious lunch in an amazing place. We sat outside in one of the fine alleys under a giant magnolia tree. Brick walkways around same giant tree, some tables under umbrellas, ours under a sort of porch, really beautiful...and WARM! and GREAT company with our friends.

So many of these sweet places, some of them only driveways

They took us to the food store and helped us shop to re-provision for the next leg of our trip. Then back to Grace to unload and say goodbye. So wonderful that they made the 3 hr drive each way to visit. Non-stop catch up conversations about travel, work, retirement, elders, health, ambitions, where to live, where to travel, how to create and/or maintain community....regular stuff.

This evening David and I took another walk into/around town, had snacks for dinner, did some planning for the next couple of days. We've decided to travel tomorrow. And, decided to not press the river and, rather, plan shorter days based somewhat on the tides, especially in this next leg where the water is ... "skinny" and twisty, turny and shoaly...all complicated, slow going if we want to stay in the water rather than running aground. And now that we are further south and in warmer weather we aren't having to move so fast to out run the cold....we hope. So a more relaxed schedule, perhaps.

So, onward...slowly.