Here we are again, back on the carriage ride.  Unfortunately, I have no photos to prove it. Forgot my camera. Ah well. At times like that I comfort myself by declaring that isn’t it nice that I’m not one who believes an experience is only really real if one photographs it. I absorbed my lessons from The Moviegoer quite well, thanks. Isn’t it nice that I can just enjoy the moment for what it is, and not think it’s only real if it’s captured on film.

But I still wish I had my camera, darn it.

We sat in the front seat of the carriage, pulled by Colby, and driven by an affable middle-aged woman who told us at the end that she’d only been a guide since February. She did just fine.

The carriage tour system is kind of interesting in and of itself – there are four different routes and I think 5 companies that run the carriage tours. Each carriage stops at a booth before going out and gets a number from the attendant – determined by lot – indicating what route you’ll take. Good system that’s intended to prevent logjam.

Oh, and when the horses do their business? They wear diapers, but it doesn’t catch everything, obviously. When anything hits the ground, the guide has to drop a marker at the spot and immediately call in the incident to Equine Services, or something, getting the Equine Services folks out on the truck to clean it up. They must be busy.

The tour could only give the barest introduction to Charleston, of course – a lot of detail on house construction, particularly in the wake of the War, the weather and the 1886 earthquake – she pointed out the washers or small crosses on the exterior walls of houses, indicating the presence of rods used to stabilize them in case of future earthquakes, rods that can be tightened to bring the house back up to speed if it seems to be sinking or pulling one way or the other – she said that with some of the homes, it’s gotten to the point where if the rods were loosened at all now, the houses would just collapse.

The gorgeous wrought iron at every turn – my favorites were between two curving staircases flowing down from the front porch – a circle of wrought iron covering, I suppose, a window at ground level (although perhaps not – I can’t imagine they have basements there) – that rather reminded me of the confessios one sees all over the place in Roman churches (and others, I’m sure). The porches on the south or southwest, to catch the air. The cupulos to let out the hot air. The shutters, painted in what looked like black, but what was often "Charleston green" – a color rooted in the black paint given to Charleston by the federal government after the war, paint that the citizens, the story goes, could not bear to use as it was, for not only was did it resonate with mourning, it was from the Yankees, so they tinted it with a bit of yellow to make Charleston Green.

Startling are the serious, vicious spikes along the fence outside one of the homes  here’s a photo I found, but the home isn’t identified, and I don’t recall which one it is. They were contructed in the wake of an 1822 slave rebellion so that the owner, as the guide put it, could keep "his people" in. Well, yes, I suppose you could put it that way. Heaven forbid you say "his slaves."

The boys did fine – the last few minutes, Michael the Baby got antsy, but was eventually calmed by the old  let’s-take-off-your-shoes-and-let-you-discover-your-toes trick. And then everyone felt better once cookies were purchased for the walk back to Broad Street.

Then, unfortunately, it was time to go – had to meet up with Michael, who was finished with his meeting, say goodbye to the Bishop, and head back West to the mountains. Charleston is definitely a place I need to get back to. "Scratch the surface" isn’t even what I did on this very short trip.

(And everyone is fine in Knoxville…although when we were there, everyone wasn’t fine, as in Michael the Baby sick all night Friday night. Six times, maybe? I lost count. Which made me dread this car trip back, on which we embarked loaded with towels and such. Mercifully, he’d apparently gotten rid of everything toxic last night. That he was emitting through his mouth, that is.)