Road Trip to Charleston | The Beachside Resident

By: Daniel Colburn

Article Category: Get Out Of Town Leave a Comment

There’s something about a good road trip I love. It must be a guy thing though, because aside from the frequent Starbucks stops, my wife hates them. But me? I love ‘em.

Maybe it’s the feeling of being behind the wheel with miles of open road in front of me; maybe it’s the delusion that I’m a care-free gypsy migrating from place to place with no real plan; or maybe it’s knowing that I can stop at any number of Stuckey’s or Shoney’s along the way for chicken fried something and that boiling hot cup of tree sap they call coffee.

But the truth is that I really do enjoy getting out and driving to someplace new. It makes me feel a little freer, helps wash off the grime of the daily grind, and sheds light on new cultures — not only at your destination, but all along the way as well.

We set out early on a Friday morning, planning on making it to Charleston, South Carolina by mid-afternoon. This was to be a house-hunting voyage, as I recently accepted a job offer in the area, so our agenda was pretty simple: Finding a place to live.

The drive afforded us some lovely reminders of why we’ve spent so many years in this wonderful state. Florida is amazing, full of some incredible scenery and humbling history, from north Volusia all the way up to south Duval along US 1 and A1A — some of the best that coastal Florida has to offer, in my opinion. Matanzas Inlet up through Anastasia Island is one of my favorite places on earth. There’s something else about Florida that became obvious to me on this trip: It’s 4,372 miles long! Seriously, does Florida really need to be that long? I mean, over half our trip was spent getting from Cocoa Beach to the Georgia border.

Navigating a new area can be tricky, so my wife (lovely angel that she is) purchased the family a portable GPS as an early Christmas gift. The new toy definitely made the trip easier and much less stressful, especially when navigating the city. Oddly, it also made for some great entertainment along the way, as the model she got us gives voice commands for directions. It’s a computerized voice that has little, if any inflection, so we got to thinking about how cool it would be to have different voices available for download to your GPS. Picture having like Sam Kinison telling you where to turn: “Ok now you wanna take this right coming up. Right here… Right there… You missed it! OH, OH!! YOU MISSED THE TURN! YOU SUCK! YOU’LL NEVER GET THERE NOW! OH, OH!!!!”

Damn it! I just gave away my million dollar idea. Anyway, as you can imagine, we had fun coming up with various voices. We eventually did make it to Charleston that afternoon amidst rain and chilly temps courtesy of a passing cold front, but we did our best not to let that dampen our adventure.

Charleston is a wonderful city with an incredibly rich history. On the one hand, it was home to wealthy southern dignitaries, military elitists and prominent businessmen and has earned a permanent place in the annals of American history for being the first to secede from the Union, arguably the initiating act of the American Civil War. On the other hand, it’s equally famous for Edward “Blackbeard” Teach’s stand at Charleston Harbor in 1718, during which he blocked all access to and from the busy port, taking hostages and demanding ransom. Interestingly enough, you can find Blackbeard t-shirts in just about every Charleston store, while the “Long live the cotton plantation!” shirts seem to be in relatively short supply.

Despite Charleston’s attachment to southern traditionalism, it’s one of the more progressive cities I’ve visited (and I’ve been to New York, San Francisco, L.A., Boston and London, to name a few). But if you dig just a little into Charleston’s past, it really isn’t all that surprising.

Though originally settled by the English, throughout its infancy and developmental period Charleston’s main inhabitants included Irish, French, Scotch, Germans and even immigrants from Bermuda and the Caribbean, all of whom helped to make the city so unique. One perfect, yet subtle example of immigrant contribution to local culture is the unique dialect of Charlestonians. The elongated vowel sounds you hear spoken by the locals are attributable to the native inflection brought by the French Huguenots, Sephardic Jews and remnants of the Gullah language spoken by the slaves during the 1700-1800s.

Gullah, which sounds remarkably like the pidgin dialects spoken in parts of the Caribbean and West Indies, is a dialect from Western Africa that was brought to the Southeast during the slave trades. The Gullah culture in and around the Southern states is really fascinating and definitely something worthy of further research, if you are so inclined. Charleston operates tours around the city which focus specifically on this somewhat enigmatic ethnicity.

Charleston is one of (if not the only) city in the south that was not segregated, and blacks and whites intermingled throughout the city, living, shopping and worshipping next to each other. Perhaps this forward thinking is what helped shape the progressive city Charleston is today.

You can easily see how progressive Charleston truly is just by taking a casual stroll. Maybe I’m a goofball, but I half-expected to see everyone looking like old Colonel Sanders clones, with white goatees and the little ribbon ties. Instead we found that the average age of the city is a spry 36. There are no less than four post-secondary institutions in the immediate Charleston area, not the least of which is the famed and prestigious Citadel Military College. Needless to say, the collegiate lifestyle flourishes in Chucktown. As you make your way down Meeting Street towards Broad and the Waterfront Park area, you’re treated to a bevy of unique shops, bars, galleries and fine restaurants.

Charleston’s downtown has loads to offer, from four-star restaurants to bohemian head shops, but if you step just outside the city you can find a softer side to the area. Being a surfer and all-around ocean lover, I convinced my wife to head east towards the beach. Folly Beach is a nifty little beach town that makes me think of what Cocoa Beach might have been like 50 years ago. There are relatively few condominiums here and lots of character. There is no main A1A-like strip, just a few minor, two-lane roads and a tiny downtown area where the main attractions seemed to be a seafood restaurant, a convenience store and a couple of surf shops.

At the southern end of Folly Beach is a great park where dogs are welcome on the beach, but the bummer is you have to go back through Charleston to get to the northern beaches as there is no bridge over the harbor on the barrier island. The added mileage is worth it though, because when you get back beachside on the north side of the harbor, you’re on Sullivan’s Island which has it’s own rich history, being home to Fort Moultrie, the predecessor to Fort Sumter.

There’s a lot more to say about Charleston and the surrounding area, but I feel the city is best experienced in person. That it’s only a 6-hour drive away makes it one of the most satisfying road trips you’re likely to take this year.