It did not seem like a very long drive even though it's a couple of states away. True, I did not drive and since we left at almost 10 pm and did not get there until 3-4 in the morning, I was snoozing most of the way.
The hotel was an absolute hole. Dirty, cracks in the walls, bugs, stinky water, you name it. In an area where hotels run between $100 and $500 a night, I found one that only charged $50 a night. I knew it was a hole, I was expecting a hotel, I just needed a place to crash. Worked fine for me. I even ate some of their room-temperature white gravy and sausage goo that was a part of their 'free breakfast'. That's budget traveling right there.
Charleston itself was pretty cool. It was a strange mix of old colonial buildings and rapid construction. Everywhere we went was bustling with either construction or reconstruction. It was an active place. There was a lot of nightlife, and even though there were lots and lots of really snooty places, there were plenty of plain old drinking holes as well.
One place we went in I shall not soon forget. We climb some stairs to a big wooden room with a long bar. A half a dozen hyper-energetic chicks wearing skimpy outfits ran the bar. A big sign over the bar proclaimed 'Our boyfriends said we could not work here….so we dumped them!'. A mixture of country and classic rock blasted through the room. The women served booze and every now and then some country song would fire up and they would hop up on the bar and perform a merry chest jiggling boot-stomp dance.
I think there were about four women in the bar who did not work there.
Now, this might seem kind of fun, but those girls were evil. Their primary job, other than slinging booze and jiggling parts of their anatomy, seemed to be abusing the patrons. I watched one spectacle before me that started out amusing, and then a slow horror crept over me as it went from funny to disturbing. They wanted to give some guy a shot. One of the girls jumped on the bar, wrapped a towel around hits face, and then grabbed his head with her knees. As she held him, a couple of the other girls swarmed around and pulled off their belts and began beating him with loud slapping cracks of their leather belts. One girl then pulled off her cowboy boot and filled it with a shot of booze. Holding his head firmly between her knees, she rolled the towel up exposing his mouth and poured the shot into his mouth. It was pretty horrible to watch, but I have to admit I was entertained. We did leave shortly after that.
Went on a couple of ghost tours. They were for the most part lame. However, they allowed us to go through a couple of the graveyards at night, and that was fun. Even is the two hundred year old graveyard was lit up by the massive parking garage two hundred feet away. We went on two separate tours and we heard the same story about a church graveyard two entirely different ways. I was amused to see a sign in the graveyard say 'The only ghost here is the Holy Ghost'.
We visited an Oak tree that was reputed to be 1,500 years old. I was impressed. This tree was a monster, sprawling its branches over a huge area. I will have to post a picture later, words cannot describe how this thing would just sort of loom over you.
Visited a tea plantation that was as boring as I expected a tea plantation to be, However, I now know what a field of tea bushes looks like. I saw some big tea-processing machine, but it was the weekend and thus was not running. Boring.
Had some great seafood, including a calamari sandwich. I also tried for the first time shrimp and grits. That was a whole new taste sensation and now I am going to be annoyed because I need to find a restaurant in Orlando that serves it.
Managed to fit in a lot in the short time I was there. More pictures will come later.
2026 Update
Setting the dial for twenty years ago, when Ed's Charleston bargain came with gravy goo and belt-based bar games.
Twenty years on, and I adore how your 'budget traveling' meant paying fifty bucks for a room with cracks, bugs, stinky water, and a free breakfast that was basically warm congealed meat sauce. Today that hotel would have a one-star rating and a viral review with photos before you'd even unpacked, and the 'free breakfast' would be individually wrapped stale pastries. Your bar story—the one with the sign, the belt-beating, the boot-shot—is a perfect time capsule. In 2006 a place like that could run on chaos and no one could prove it. Now every patron has a pocket teleprompter, and that routine would be livestreamed to a horrified nation in minutes. The ghost tours? Lame then, and now they'd have a true-crime podcast and a Bluetooth-enabled candlestick. And shrimp and grits? It took a frantic search in Orlando; today it's on the menu at every brunch spot between here and Hades. You were crashing through the last wild west of hospitality, Ed. You didn't know it, but you were my favorite kind of tourist: one with no plan and no insurance.
“2006 Ed, after watching a stranger get his head held between a bartender's knees and beaten with belts, did you check the exit before or after you ate that free gravy goo?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, you're asking the real questions. Honestly? I didn't check any exits, before or after, mostly because my brain was still replaying the belt-slapping horror show while my stomach was making demands about the free breakfast. I'm a man of priorities, and apparently my priority was room-temperature sausage goo. The bar, the boots, the knees—that was all entertainment, sure, but a free breakfast is a sacred budget-traveler ritual. I ate the goo the next morning, if I remember right, and I think I justified it to myself as 'well, at least the bugs in the room were too tired to bother me.' Did I regret it later? Maybe a little, but the shrimp and grits made up for it. I'm a simple creature: give me cheap food and a good story and I'll worry about exits when I need them. Which, so far, has been never.
