Final Dog Days of Bike Tour

On Thursday, we biked 31 miles to the Charleston Tea Plantation, the only place in North America to grow and process tea. Since I am a tea aficionado, I really enjoyed the indoor and outdoor tours and bought some souvenirs. (Lauren Pressley: I thought of you while we were there!) Bill is a coffee guy, so he choose to do an extra loop to the waterfront while we were on tour. One of the highlights on the ride was the Angel Oak, a live oak tree rumored by the natives to be 1400 years old. We heard a story that the Spoleto Festival held a ballet on flooring placed under the tree a couple of years ago and two yellow snakes, caught enthusiastically mating in the branches, fell to the floor on top of the dancers! Above is a picture of the Angel Oak. On Thursday night we had dinner at High Cotton, one of the best restaurants in Charleston.

On Friday, the trip came to an exciting conclusion. We only biked 22 miles but we had all kinds of dog encounters, the most exciting of which was when a pretty little black lab mix ran alongside our bikes for THREE MILES. She wouldn't go home, no matter what we did. She was even bowled over by a pit bull on the way and was even more determined after that to stay by the nice bikers she decided to adopt. We finally stopped and called our van support, asking them to take the dog back to where we found it. They couldn't find anyone who knew the dog and left it with some people who said they would take care of it but when we checked later we found that the real owner came looking for her and so the story ended happily. We almost had a sister for Salem and Homer! In all the excitement, I forgot to take a picture of the dog, but here is a picture of two nice horses with whom we shared an apple.

We had lunch at the Caw Caw Interpretive Center and then returned to the Charleston hotel where we left our car last Saturday and drove home. It was a great trip and I highly recommend Carolina Tailwinds to everyone!