The Mixed Up Files of Detective Oliver Benson

So last week when I drove from Sarasota Florida up to Charleston South Carolina for a wedding I was all excited to make this video during the drive.

For those of you who don't know I am from Sarasota but grew up in Charleston so I made the drive between the two several times a year from when I was 8-18 years old. Especially once I got my car and would make the trip by myself I came to really love it. The trip takes about 8 hours which is the perfect amount of time to lose yourself on the highways and find interesting landmarks on the country highways like 301 and 17.

So there is a place on highway 17 that's between 95 and Charleston and I always used to love it. If you were traveling to charleston this was the first glimpse of the marsh that you would get after spending the past 5 hours seeing nothing but interstate, and if you were leaving Charleston it was your last glimpse of beauty until you hit Florida.

There are several things that I loved about this stretch of highway. The transition from overhanging oak trees to wide open marshland is incredibly sudden and dramatic. I actually wasn't really sure that I knew where it was when I made the trip and it definitely snuck up on me so the video I took only really shows the marsh. I loved how long this little strip of asphalt stretched through the marsh with only a tiny row of bushes on either side to stop you if anything happened and you found yourself careening towards pluffmud doom. Mostly I just loved this entrance to the lowcountry, it comes about an hour and a half away from charleston so it always made me excited to be so close to home.

What ended up being kind of sad though was that since I've made this trip last they had started working on expanding this section of 17 to make it four lanes. It's hard to get too upset about the devastation to the ecosystem of the marshland by bringing in all this construction equipment because it's not like the road i'm already on was a natural part of the land, but still its very sad seeing what the view used to be like on the right and then how ugly it is to the left.

I was thinking of not posting this video at all but then I decided that I really should because it still shows something that I loved, just how it changes just like everything else. My whole trip to Charleston was like this, I could still see the elements of it that made Charleston what it was for me, but also how it has moved on.