Baseball water tower was right outside Charlotte for their minor league team on the road to South Cackalacky, and a trucker hauling a couple of huge tires:

I found a book at Second Editions for $4 before I left town: Charleston: A Golden Memory, by Charles R. Anderson, a fond memoir of a year spent in Charleston in 1939. It seemed to be a soft focus, tea-with-old-ladies prose in the store, but on closer reading took a couple of unintended detours into condescension and Racist City (More like Charleston: a WHITE Memory). For instance, the young couple starts out looking for someone to cook and clean (read: do the shit work): "...asked if she knew where we could get a maid, she sent us Lucile, a cheerful, intelligent young black woman...." Later in the story they graciously allow Lucile to keep (her own!) radio when they move house to a beachfront cottage, and there is a recounting of visiting relatives bringing "Henry -- a married man, but not averse to a little holiday dalliance....Lucile's slender good looks and knowing city ways soon had him dancing...." This rake was put up on the ground floor with Lucile. There is a played-for-laughs scene where Henry contrives to have "forgotten" his white coat and is relegated to the kitchen, in spite of his entreaties: "Miss Eugenia, just lemme sort of hover out there helping a little where I can hear but not mostly be seen...!" This is followed by: ""...as the stories got under way, and the laughter followed, poor Henry became almost frantic." When he had "done sufficient penance for his sin of forgetting" they eventually produce a borrowed white coat so that the hapless Henry is allowed to come out and serve their uptight white asses. I would have loved to know what *else* went into those mint juleps Henry so "properly frosted."

Charleston: The Soggy Memory (the soggy blog?) It rained so hard that the animals started pairing up outside. The campground was right on the water -- great scenery even with the howling winds and torrential downpour. One of the camp cabins was a caboose, complete with a section of track:

Charleston: The Batty Memory -- In spite of the downpour, we drove down Highway 17 over the river to visit the city proper; we had tickets for Batman Begins at the IMAX.

It wasn't truly IMAX, it was a digitally remastered print that stretched the movie to fit, and the surround sound was a deafening thrum. But there were a few scenes that lent themselves to the IMAX feeling of weightlessness and wheeeeee!! -- one of Liam Neeson sparring ninja-like with Batman atop a glacier, and the flyovers of Gotham city and the rollercoaster-like public transit system.

We drove around downtown looking for a FedEx location to ship a FlashCube phone order that Wes took while we were getting diesel in Charlotte.

Charleston: The Crabby Memory -- We went to a seafood restaurant downtown off Market Street to try lowcountry crabcakes, on Gwen's recommendation. Completely different from Maryland crabcakes: made of mostly crabmeat but not lumps, no Old Bay but different seasonings, and topped with a creamy remoulade sauce. Even the crab pictured on the menu was different, with a rounded body instead of the pointy-edged ones back home. Different, but tasted great :) We missed the "crabby hour" (happy hour) by thirty minutes, but all of the waitrons in the establishment were Charleston-polite, although nobody had a southern accent -- probably all of them out-of-town students from the College of Charleston up on George Street.

The Cooper River Bridge on the way out of town, in the better-late-than-never sunshine: