The Boone Hall Plantation & Charleston

Wednesday 26.5. Charleston & Boone Hall Plantation (South Carolina)

At 9:00 am we are already in the car. Next to the hotel is a small restaurant where we get a bagel. The hotel offers free coffee, so we combined both for a quick breakfast and planning the day.

Our destination for the day is the Boone Hall Plantation, from 1681. Once huge and with up to 290 slaves who grew rice and later cotton, this plantation is now almost an optical term for most people because the more than 1 kilometer long oak avenue with the Spanish Moss leads to a magnificent mansion and both served as the backdrop for the movie journey "Gone with the Wind" with Patrick Swayze. 100 old oaks line this avenue and touch each other in the middle above the sandy path. It's really a great setting. The trees are up to 280 years old.

We take a trolley tour through the agricultural areas that look somewhat uncared for. Then we take part in a guided tour of the mansion, which barely has any really old parts because the house was only built in 1936 on the foundations of the original house from 1743. At that time, there was no electricity, running water, toilet or kitchen (those were always outside the houses because they burned down 2-3 times a year). That was updated during the reconstruction in the 1930s, so the interior of this house is quite nice but not really old for us Europeans.

Outside the garden (with a smokehouse!) of the mansion there are some stone houses where the slaves lived. Inside there is some information about the slaves' lives and the lists that the slave traders made about their "merchandise", as well as newspaper advertisements as advertising for slave trade days. There are small films and of course Obama is also a very important result here.

Outside, a colored woman is selling so-called sweetwater grass woven goods, which are expensive (although beautiful). A type of flat basket/bowl is supposed to cost $180!

At 12:00 noon we finish our visit and drive to a nearby market restaurant, which is housed in a kind of farm shop. Today the entrance to the plantation was very cheap: The gatekeeper classified us as retirees, which is not very flattering in principle, but only cost us $15 per person, including the tram tour of the agriculture and the mansion tour.

We drive back to Charleston and stroll down to the water to the Cooper River. Charleston has a pretty large port, we see cranes and huge container ships frequently pass by. The area around East Battery is very beautiful, here one magnificent villa follows the next, all with a beautiful view of the bay.

We walk around on cobblestone streets and see old, sometimes crooked brick houses and wooden houses. By the way, all the bricks came from the Boone Hall Plantation, where the slaves made them by hand in the winter when there was nothing to do in the rice fields.

The weather is pleasant with 26 degrees, but slightly cloudy. It's not the best light for photos. So we grab a coffee and drive to North Charleston to an outlet. Right next to it we see a cinema and spontaneously go to see "Forever Shrek" (Shrek IV) in 3D, a nice movie!

Thinking that Charleston looks particularly beautiful in the evening light, we drive down East Battery again and around the small park along the great houses. But there is hardly any street lighting and all the houses are in the dark. Only the shopping street King Street still looks nice. We have a very quick Budweiser in the small restaurant next to the hotel (they want to close) and are in our room at 10:30 pm.