Charleston Day 2

On our second day in Charleston we decided that we could not go to Charleston and not visit at least one plantation. We did a little research on the most kid friendly (Charlie proof, if possible) plantation that we could find. We decided on Magnolia Plantation. It had a combination of outdoor scenery (there is no way that Charlie can go inside a plantation) and child attractions.

Magnolia offers a Nature Train and a Nature Boat ride; we chose the train because with our daredevil, the boat sounded like Charlie could turn into gator food. The train was fun for the first 20 minutes of the 45 minute excursion. We learned that the plantation grew 70% of the rice in the world prior to the Civil War and that Swamp Thing was filmed there. After the first 20 minutes, Charlie decided that without any gator sitings he needed to jump, pull, and scream to make sure everyone had a good time (guess he wasn't that impressed by the Swamp Thing filming site).

After the Nature Train, we strolled through the gardens. The garden is the oldest established public garden in the United States and is absolutely beautiful. The garden had several statues, scenic bridges and was home of the first alligator that we saw on our trip. Joe was very excited to see that a prairie plant, the Purple Cone Flower, was represented and had a show and tell moment.

The petting zoo was not quite as aromatic as the gardens; however, it was the highlight of the trip for the boys. The main attractions were: a huge pig (Joe said I obviously had not seen many pigs to call this one huge), tame deer, turkeys, goats, and a reptile hut (no petting).

In the afternoon we let the boys go to one of the many fountains in town and cool off. After a little encouragement from Joe, the boys really enjoyed running through the fountain and using the fountain to spray their hair back. Neither of the boys wanted to leave, but after over an hour we called it a night. Needless to say, we did not have any trouble getting the boys to go to sleep that night.