After breakfast in a cute nearby cafe, we headed downtown to the wharf, to catch a sightseeing boat for a ninety-minute tour of the Charleston harbor. It was a bit foggy, but we could still see Fort Sumter from the dock, and we could see the huge bridge across the river, so I figured it would be okay. The fog lifted during the tour, but it stayed overcast, which was fine with us since we were sitting on the top deck. Too much sun could have been hot, and certainly could have burned one or more of us pasty people.

The tour was mellow, but informative and often funny. The captain of the boat narrated as we went around the harbor, and we learned a bunch of things:

• The cruise ship dock is either going to get a facelift or a new one will be built soon. The current one is quite ugly.
• No building in downtown can be higher than the highest church steeple (about 240 feet).
• The first shot of the Civil War was fired from Fort Johnson (which is near Fort Sumter), which fired a warning shot that signaled other Confederate cannons to fire on Fort Sumter.
• Fort Sumter surrendered when its men ran out of supplies and after they had been hit by an estimated 45,000 cannonballs. No one was killed in the battle, although one Union army solder died after a gunpowder accident during the military honors that the Confederate army gave to the surrendering soldiers.
• For Sumter used to be quite a bit taller, but was knocked down by all the cannon fire.
• During the Revolutionary War, the British fired on a wooden fort in Charleston harbor, but the cannonballs just bounced off the local palmetto wood. The Americans went out and collected the balls and shot them back.
• The far side of the harbor is one of the most expensive places to buy a home in the US.
• Charleston shrimp are never frozen – they are sent directly to local markets.
• The huge bridge was built after one of the two old bridges received a safety rating of four (out of one hundred).
• The new bridge came in under budget and ahead of schedule.
• And we saw two dolphins playing in the wake of the prow of the boat. That was fun.

After the tour, we headed across said huge bridge to Mt. Pleasant, where we grabbed a quick lunch, and then drove to Patriots Point, the home of the retired aircraft carrier the USS Yorktown. It is also home to a destroyer and other military exhibits, but we only had time for the Yorktown.

What a ship. It is ginormous, and the Yorktown is small by today’s standards. We spent almost five hours on board her, and we still didn’t see everything (although we came very close). We talked to some Navy vets at the information center so we could ask them general questions about carriers, and then we set off touring the hanger deck, where aircraft used to be stored. It is now home to many displays, and the World War 2 aircraft that would have been on board. The top deck is home to the jets and other planes that were used on the Yorktown until she was retired in 1970.

We saw a good film that interviewed several (now older) members of the crew, which was informative and touching, especially when they were talking about the friends they lost. The movie also spliced in original footage from World War 2.

We took self-guided tours of the guts of the boat. The ship was home to three thousand men, and so became a small city. It had three dentists on board, a police staff, a brig, a snack shop, regular doctor office hours (twice a day), a laundry, a machine shop, electronics repair, a kitchen capable of serving three thousand men four meals a day (counting “midrat” – a meal a midnight for men on duty). The kitchen had ingredients set out to make ten thousand chocolate chip cookies.

I loved going all the way down to one of the engine rooms. It is full of huge machines and is very cramped, and when running, it could get up to 130 degrees. The ship ran off of steam generated by oil-fired boilers. There were four engine rooms each driving a fifteen-ton propeller. I think the fastest speed I saw listed was thirty knots (thirty-four mph) if all four were running full-out.

On the other end, we got up to the flight deck, and then were able to climb up into the bridge. The views of the area were grand, and the sun had come fully out.

The Yorktown was involved in the first carrier versus carrier battle in which the fight was all carried out by planes – the ships never saw each other. She was also involved in the battle for Midway (after having been patched together in seventy-two hours for repairs that should have taken weeks).  The Yorktown survived the war and was in service long enough to be the recovery ship for Apollo 8, which was the first Apollo mission to orbit the moon.

It was a fascinating afternoon. Dubbs waited patiently while Meredith and I finished up by getting into a flight simulator (which was fun, but really just an amusement ride), and then lying flat on our backs in a mock-up of Apollo 8 to see film of that mission. And so, we closed the museum out.

After Patriots Point, we headed what I thought would be a short distance to an amusement place with mini-golf and go-karts and games. It turned out the map I was using didn’t have an obvious scale, and it took about twenty minutes to get there. We waited about thirty minutes total to ride the go-karts (they only had seven). I had thought it would be fun to take advantage of the warm evening, and it was, but I hadn’t anticipated such a long wait.

We ended the evening by trying to find a restaurant that was not where the GPS said it would be, followed by one that was out of business, followed by one that was short-staffed and took about an hour to get us our food. There, the waitresses were nice and comped us almost all of our bill, so although it was a bit of a wait for the food, at least we got in an inexpensive meal.

And so ends our tour of Charleston. We will head back to Asheville tomorrow to go see the Biltmore Estate, and then head home on Thursday. Charleston was highly recommended to us, and it turned out to live up to expectations. Fun city.