South Carolina Aquarium
South Carolina Aquarium || Charleston, SC || July 2016
Last weekend, we decided to try out one of our “rainy day/way too hot to be outside day” ideas on account of the forecast being the latter. Simply too hot to enjoy being outside! I had heard some good things about the aquarium and it was different than everything else we’d done around here. Because we had seen how long the line to get in gets in the afternoon, we went as early as we could, shortly after it opened at 9. The aquarium features 2 stories of exhibits, both outdoor and indoor, and we spent about 3 hours touring the whole thing. Of course when you think of aquarium, you think of fish, but along with sea creatures of many types, there are also birds, reptiles, and an otter, most of which were rescued and injured in some way or another and are being taken care of here.
The exhibits are mostly set up by region/where the sea creatures are from – such as the swamps, piedmont, mountains, and ocean. I thought the swamp facts we learned were pretty interesting and made me realize that this land is necessary – even though we may wish it were mountains instead. 😉 We saw an albino alligator, and got to touch a little gator, horseshoe crabs, dogfish sharks, and sting rays. There were other presentations going on that we listened to, at least in part. One was featuring birds and we watched pelicans fight over treats the presenter was tossing at them, then we watched a scuba diver chill out in the big tank with an eel, sharks, a sea turtle, and many other fish. All in all, it was a great tour and we enjoyed ourselves even if we were like 4 times the average age of the visitors there. 😉
While we were touring, we noticed that it was thunderstorming outside, and once we left and the storms had cleared up, it was actually quite pleasant outside so we decided to go for a walk. We walked to Marion Square where the Charleston farmer’s market was going on and grabbed a bite to eat there. Next, we went out in search of a cool building I had seen on Sciway.com. Sciway is a great site for pointing out historical or significant attractions around the state, and has given us a few new places to be excited about looking for.
Today’s target was the Old Charleston Jail. We wandered around Charleston’s college campus and headed generally South on the peninsula until we found it on Magazine Street. Prior to today, I didn’t believe that a “sketchy” area of beautiful historic downtown Charleston existed…but we definitely found it today! The jail closed in 1939, and is currently owned by the American College of the Building Arts. After the fact, a friend told us that they run Charleston ghost tours out of here, and that the place is haunted. We thought the big abandoned building was really cool, it was more the area it was in that was unsettling to us. We made our way over to Church Street so that we could stroll down those pretty, picture-perfect streets we love.
We did attempt one letterbox, but were unsuccessful because the cemetery gates were closed. (Curtis still gave it a good attempt from the outside!) Thankfully, there was something else occupying Curtis’ mind and phone that he was more successful at finding… yeah, one of us is into Pokemon Go. The other is just glad that they aren’t the only one that’s constantly stopping to take pictures. Guess which one of us is which. 😉
And that was our Saturday adventure – short and sweet; giving us a little more appreciation for our city and more memories to cherish of our sweet life together. We can’t always go hike mountains, but we can always find contentment and happiness when sharing life together.
