Charleston, SC

Some NY friends were flying down to SC to vacation with relatives down in Charleston, so we gladly met up with them.  My friend actually grew up as kid in Charleston before moving to Long Island, NY as a teen so we actually toured a bit where he grew up too.  Which is always kind of neat to see where your friends grow up, right?  Of course, like me, he marveled how much has changed since he was a kid there.

We started with a healthy, wonderfully positive-vibed lunch at Cafe Aluettes.  The owner/chef, Aluette Jones-Smalls, beat out cancer and decided to only prepare food prepared without harmful chemicals--it's a no-pork, no-sugar, vegan/vegetarian friendly restaurant which features local vendors for seafood and organic produce.  Plus the decor was cozy and comfortable:

We decided to walk around downtown Charleston for a spell.  It was unfortunately one of those humid 90-something days where the heat index said "it felt like 100-something".  We stopped in a few stores for fun and relief from the heat:, like Robot Candy Company:

King Street was full of fun shops and some really cool looking restaurants--it kind of reminded me of Abbot Kinney Blvd in Venice, CA, except that my face was melting off my skull here in Charleston.  I'd recommend a walk here in the fall.

We also walked a bit through the City Market, which my friend said as a kid was called the Slave Market because historically that's what it was.  It's huge--really long inside!  It's full of vendors selling various wares varying from hand-crafted baskets and metalcraft to t-shirts to fancy sheets.

If it were evening I would have loved to have gone to the rooftop bar at the Market Pavilion Hotel.  But in the heat of day, it was a lot less enticing and it would have maddening for the girl to be a near a pool that she couldn't swim in.  On the plus side, we all went to the Charleston Costco!

The best, best part was seeing how our kids have grown--here they were in 2009:

And now:

Yeesh, I wish these kids would outgrow their impatience for picture-taking like they did their old clothes! I mean--their expressions are almost the same! They're just taller and bigger.  Oh well, still cute kids.