Easter in Charleston

We had planned a Columbus Day trip to Charleston, SC, but it got cancelled due to a hurricane. So we rescheduled for the next 4 day weekend where we didn't have plans, which happened to be Easter weekend. I wasn't wild about travelling on Easter, but we were eager to go, and our free flights and hotel nights won't last forever, so we went. We had a great time.

This is the kids doing an egg hunt for FHE the Monday before Easter. We figured we wouldn't be able to hide eggs outside the room on real Easter, so we dyed eggs and did a proper hunt ahead of time. I would have liked to do it on Orthodox Easter, but it just happened to be the same day this year as Roman Catholic Easter. Oh well. The older kids were very kind with helping Eliza find eggs.

The trip to Charleston went pretty well. The kids were well behaved, even if Eliza required a lot of attention to keep her happy. The above picture is us getting our feet wet at a popular pineapple fountain in Waterfront Park. The older kids promptly got themselves wetter than we wanted, but can you blame them after being cooped up on a plane? 

 The next morning we went on a little harbor tour that took us to Morris Island, where we got to wander the beach and pick up shells. Clark found a bit of coral and we all got some pretty good shells. On the way back, the guide pulled up a crab trap that they had set in the harbor. inside was this one little blue crab. They said he wasn't quite big enough to keep, and he was missing one claw. Apparently that is a sustainable way of eating crabs - you take one claw and toss the crab back since it will regrow its lost claw and only needs one to survive.

Here we are looking around the downtown market in Charleston. The kids found lots of things they wanted to buy. It was interesting to see how many people were there on mid-morning Saturday dressed really nicely. I guess coastal Southerners take dressing nicely in public more seriously than people in Southern California where I grew up.

So this is a picture of Eliza sleeping in the hiking backpack, but it has more of a story to it than meets the eye. We went to a restaurant for lunch near the market and Eliza fell asleep in the backpack just before we got there. They seated us upstairs, where there was only one other group seated. I stood by our table for a while, worried that removing the backpack would wake the baby up. Then a guy from the other group starts talking to me about how cool the backpack is and how he hasn't seen anything like it before. I talked to him a little about how useful it was, then he joked that he wished he could ride in one. Then he asked if I could carry him around in this one. I said I'd be happy to but that I thought it had a 60 pound weight limit. He said he'd be willing to get down to 60 pounds to ride in the backpack. I said something else about how I would have to consider going into the business of carrying adults around in the backpack as a form of taxi service. Then I started taking the backpack off to sit down, and Yogurl is all wide eyed and is like, "That's Harry Connick, Jr.!" I thought, "Yeah I thought that guy looked and sounded familiar." Anyway, it really made my wife's day to know that Harry Connick, Jr. really wanted to ride on her husband's back.

Dreaming about Harry on a swinging bench by a playground the kids played at for a while.

The kids had so much fun at the pineapple fountain, we went back Saturday with a swim diaper for Eliza so they could all play a lot more in the fountains there. 

Doing a hotel room Easter morning egg hunt. 

 A little Easter picture just outside of church. It was a very nice ward. I knew my wife would approve once I saw how heavy the military population was in the ward. 

We bought these palmetto roses on Saturday from some young guys who were making them from palm leaves near the fountains where we played.

On Sunday we also went out to see the Angel Oak Tree, which is a massive, beautiful 400 year old tree. The kids weren't allowed to play on it, which was very hard for them, but they did enjoy seeing it as well. 

Easter dinner in the hotel. We had eaten some pork barbecue Saturday night, and my wife had the brilliant idea to get some more pork and beans to go. I ran out to the store Saturday after the kids were in bed and bought some bread and a salad mix and voila, we had a delicious, super easy Easter dinner in our room. We also had some birthday cake, but we didn't get any pictures of that somehow. It was super good, but not as good as homemade. 

Eliza loved riding on the hotel elevator. She would run right on when the door opened and go right up to the wall and reach up and hold a rail. Sometimes she would run to the corner and hold two rails. 

Our last morning we went to Battery Park and played around for a while. The kids thought the variety of cannons there were pretty exciting. I'm not sure they are supposed to be climbing on them, but they did and I didn't discourage it.