tgif?

Are you allowed to say that if you spent the better part of your friday here?

Not that i'm complaining, it was pretty nice out.  The water is finally warm enough to go in without having to run and brace yourself, and there were enough clouds in the sky that I didn't felt like I was getting cooked without my umbrella.

Going on my little mini vacation to Lido today made me even more excited for my trip up to the carolinas coming up.  I am still not entirely sure what my plans are going to be in the coming days/weeks but I eagerly await the beginning of summer road trip 2011.

So close!  So very close.

treasured memories

My computer has started telling me that there isn't even enough free space for me to download pictures off my phone to use for my blog.  So I've decided it's time to back up my old files and do a clean sweep.

Of course this is also an excuse to take a trip down old memory lane.  I'll try not to bore you all with a million pictures of my life from the past 10 years (that's about how far back the pictures go), but aren't those sunflowers pretty?  They were in a field down the street from where I used to live in South Carolina.  Meghan and I took a trip out there one day, I think when we were playing hooky from summer school, and had a photo shoot.

There were also many pictures of our debauchery in and around charleston throughout our youth.  A bunch of great photos from the night we were house/dog-sitting for Jojo's aunt and uncle.  For some reason we were all wearing trucker hats, as was the style at the time.  Many of the pictures will not be seen as they feature too many faces and too much beer cans and other paraphernalia (wtf that is seriously the spelling of that word) that I don't need sullying my blog.

But here are some pictures of a nice nice doggy!

poo poo patrol?

In high school we had a really crazy science teacher who made us learn all of the scientific names for shells, among many other random things. We were at a Florida zoo and they had a shell collection in the gift shop. When I saw this I had so many memories come flooding back.

For some reason this teacher would refer to detention as "poo poo patrol" and would cordon off a corner of the dry erase board and label it "P3" (p cubed). If you did anything wrong, or if he was feeling uppity at you for no reason at all, your name would get put in the box for poo poo patrol.

He was my homeroom teacher in 9th grade and one morning some middle school kids were reading their poetry during the morning announcements. Somebody sitting next to me made me laugh and he thought I was laughing at their poetry so he gave me poo poo patrol. It was the only time I ever had it. I had to stay after school and pick up trash from the student parking lot with Joel Hamilton. I remember we found a condom.

This teacher would also frequently remind us that men could get breast cancer too, and then to emphasize the point would gently cup his man boobs.

If you want to get an idea of what he was like just imagine Wendy Williams as a middle aged french canadian man. I'm not kidding, they are pretty much exactly the same person.

Saturday afternoon

Saturday afternoon was spent at Eliza's parents home on Sullivan's Island. I guess they have been here for about 4 years now but this was the first time I had been back to Charleston since they built it and moved in. There has always been much debate about which of her houses was "the best". Her father, having been in real estate for all of our childhoods, moved around quite a bit so there are quite a few different homes that each hold special memories for anybody privy to be invited.

If not for the home itself, this one has to take the cake just for the view. This first video I took was standing in the pool and looking from the neighbors to the left over to the neighbors to the right. I couldn't take a picture because the view was too expansive, even from inside the house, so I had to take a video.

This second video I took while walking down the incredibly long dock to the boat house where we spent part two of our afternoon. I understand if you get too seasick to watch the whole thing, but it's pretty incredible. You can see the new bridge all the way over to the sullivans island draw bridge.

So the point of this post was supposed to be more about what an amazing afternoon we had, not just how incredible the view was, but I feel like being in such a beautiful and quintessentially charleston environment only added to the ambiance of the afternoon.

It started with Jojo and Katie hanging out in and by the pool with us. Margaret made us margaritas that were too perfect. It all felt very right, and like we hadn't ever left.

We had lunch on the porch before we went down the dock to swim in the marsh while it was still high tide. I don't think i've laughed that hard in a long time, in general. Just a whole afternoon of laughter and sly glances exchanged between old friends.

We had a break in the afternoon when we took Jojo back home and I got to visit with her Mom who I hadn't seen in quite some time. On the way back we picked up Meghan and Sam and began our second part of my Saturday of amazingness.

We took Meghan and Sam out to the dock to show them the view and enjoy champagne that Margaret has insisted we have (to much arm twisting of course). It didn't take long for Sam to find the rope attached to the crab trap and begin pulling it up. It didn't take long for decisions to be made that the crabs must be cooked and eaten.

I have to say, I feel bad for crabs. Meghan was quick to point out that I am pretty much constantly eating cheeseburgers, which may be true, but there was something about those sad crabs holding on to the bars of the cage for dear life, knowing the boiling doom that awaited them. It was just sad. I know, I'm a hypocrite, I can't help it.

Regardless of the carnage, it was the perfect end to an amazing low country day. The three of them feasted on crab while i took a nighttime swim in the pool and watched the headlights cross the new cooper river bridge.

As incredible as it was to be able to spend the day in a home like that, feeling like you had stepped in to a pottery barn catalogue, the very end of our evening was just as special. We finally got ourselves back to meghan's house where we found a huge container of shrimp creole that her parents had made. Meghan, Sam, and I ended the night sitting around the cozy kitchen table eating shrimp creole and laughing about everything.

from IOP to Sullivans

On Saturday I met Eliza for breakfast at the Seabiscuit cafe on Isle of Palms and then followed her to her parents on Sullivan's Island.

Everything about it was amazing, the perfect charleston day for me. I had the best bowl of grits and an amazing conversation with an old friend.

When I was following her to her parents house I knew I wanted to make a video of driving the bridge between iop and sullivans, because it was another one of those memories i will always have of growing up. Bouncing around from one persons house to another, freeze pops at Meghans and debauchery at Andrews poolhouse. I will always love this little drive over Breach Inlet.

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.