Charleston, South Carolina

A few weeks ago, in July, I mentioned our upcoming stop in Charleston to my friend Tsia. Tsia is one of the most naturally cool people I know; she runs both a successful design firm in NYC with her husband and a popular DIY lifestyle blog, and lives in home built co-housing on an island in Beacon, NY.

So, when Tsia she fairly gushed at the mention of Charleston, I knew we were on the right track.

I did a bit more research on the city and found that, like most cool places (and things) Adam and I 'discover,' everyone who is actually hip already knows about it. But it's all new to us.

The port is filled with ships, trade ships, cruise ships. And still buttressing the city are crumbly old forts on hidden islands, just out of sight from the shore. Inland, impressive stone churches cover entire city blocks and mossy cemeteries, massive museums of modern art and narrow, winding streets slow the flow of traffic. Dozens of public courtyards and statuesque fountains, tucked between funky bookstores and clothing consignment. In the old French Quarter, the morning light gorgeous white and, at night, we watched silent streaks of lightening from our third-floor window at the stately Mills House Hotel. Everywhere, the streets are lined with shaggy palms. Plus, Parisian breakfasts, a honey store, picnic platters, old-school dining rooms, a contemporary artist's co-op and design school and cornbread, always cornbread, every time you eat.

All overlaid with Charleston's own calmness, belying its controversial past and subtle suspicion of Yankees. Plus, just a whiff of pride and significant, but tolerable, humidity.

Charmed, naturally.

Low Country Cuisine

We have a friend, Shawna, a famous Ottawa food writer, who loves both Southern BBQ and, conversely, everything about Paris, France.

In Charleston, the two come together in ways so natural that the average traveler doesn't even notice. Like pulled pork with mustard sauce, instead of one based on tomato and brown sugar. Or coleslaw with bacon lardons and mayonnaise, a French condiment that we rarely attribute to the source. Pickles, relish, vinegar are on many tables and its not hard to get a flaky croissant for breakfast. These, from the 18th century Hugenot immigration; French Protestants who came to North America to escape persecution.

Of course, low-country cuisine emerged from a number of influences, like the indigenous and adapted recipes of Caribbean and African slaves (many who were forced to cook for wealthy white families. Their recipes were passed onto subsequent generations, right through to emancipation. The proximity to the coast is also a big influence; she-crab soup is a local specialty and sauteed shrimp is often used to top a serving of grits. In the days before refrigeration, fresh seafood could only be eaten along the coast, so the presence of shellfish in the low-country diet helps distinguish it from other versions of Southern cuisine. Charleston also has significant marshlands and the earliest colonialists quickly realized they were perfect for growing rice, both for local consumption and international export.

Charleston's modern food scene is far from a secret (droves of celebrities traveling to the city have driven prices up in the last few years). But it was all new for Adam and I. We've been eating boiled fresh peanuts, lightly fried-green tomatoes with delicate ranch dressing, thick wedges of cornbread with soft butter and South Carolinian honey; cold sherry coleslaw, cucumber and onion salad, cheesy gratin of summer squash and onions; buttermilk fried chicken with ham hock gravy; warm grits; chunky spiced applesauce (tastes like my mama's); lemon ice box pie; hoppin' john; new green beans and potatoes; tender pulled pork; collard greens (laced with bacon); kale salad; French lentils; key lime pie on a stick; local peach lager; Cheerwine soda; and several pints of unsweetened iced tea.

It might sound like we'd be full up, but we're just getting started.

Comment Contest!

Remember to join the comment contest; leave the best comment to win something from one of our road trip stops! So far, Adam's mum is leading the race.

Carolina Beach, North Carolina

Saturday morning, Adam and I took a two-hour ferry between Ocracoke and Cedar Island. Just as we were docking, we felt a sprinkle of rain, and by the time we started driving, it was coming down hard. We passed the island's one variety store, a few dozen trailers, sagging wooden houses and boarded up fish shacks. Within a few minutes, we were on a narrow road with a deep, dark bog on either side, no shoulder and no guardrail. It almost impossible to see, but there was no wayto pull over either.

Quickly, we realized that we had arrived in 'God's country'; there were massive churches every few hundred feet, some marked by digital marquees and all made from brick or stone with impressive steeples and manicured lawns. They stood in stark contrast to the area's obvious poverty; there were few schools or hospitals and communities consisted mainly of homegrown machine shops, dollar stores and tiny houses with broken screen doors. I grew up in a similar kind of place, a rural area of New Brunswick where residents give over a lot of their meager incomes to fund religious institutions.

As we drove along Highway 17, we also spotted banners hung from the chain-link fences lining the roads. Memorials, mementos, love letters to returning soldiers. "Welcome back to North Carolina. Where the beer is cold and your woman is hot." "Always under the same stars, finally under the same roof. Welcome home, Dad."

After several hours of driving, we pulled into Carolina Beach State Park, a beautiful forested area at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. The park is famous for the carnivorous flytraps, but we couldn't find any, partly because poachers have gotten a lot of them this summer. We spotted a couple of ground skinks (tiny brown lizards marked by a bright white stripe), though, along with several white-tailed deer, baby blue crabs and a brown beetle the size of a ping pong ball!

Part of Sunday, we had to sacrifice to doing laundry, so we drove into Wilmington, what seemed like a small, nowheresville port city. But it had such verve! We ate lunch at Chops, an edgy, locally-owned deli that uses only Boar's Head meats and cheeses in their sandwiches. Afterward, Adam took our laundry to a gritty laundromat/bar with craft beer, free wi-fi and an impressive collection of bathroom stall graffiti. I, meanwhile, bopped around downtown Wilmington, which is hosts to a pretty decent-sized film and TV industry (including Dawson's Creek). We also stopped at the Louise Cameron Art Gallery on the edge of town and saw a show by Fritizi Huber, a Wilmington native who was raised in a circus family.

Back, at the campsite, we played a round of washerboard with our neighbours and then went to the beach one last time. Very excited about the last freeze-dried meal for a while, but sad it's our last chance to be in the ocean.

Ocracoke Island, North Carolina

Thursday morning, Adam and I waited in line for the little ferry from Hatteras Island to Ocracoke, another island, much smaller, which is the last of the Outer Banks. The ferries that run the route are small and free and so the queue is long, but once aboard, we caught a salty breeze on deck and saw a slick gray dolphin jumping in and out of the water!

We loved Ocracoke immediately. It's small -- you can drive from one end to the other in fifteen or twenty  minutes -- and incredibly beautiful. The island has ponies (feral, not wild, just like the ones on Assateague) and we saw Paloma, the first filly to be born on the island in a couple decades, rolling around to cool off in the sand. The beaches here are lovely and clean (with no trucks!). And it's got a tiny, funky beach community with coffee stands, bake shops and little traffic (except from bikes and golf carts).

Since we were still on the camping leg of our journey, we picked out a site at the national campground, another rustic place to call home with cold showers and beach access just over the dunes. The waves were massive -- at least eight feet high, judging them against the top of Adam's head. This made for excellent rounds of 'tsunami,' a game I'm told that Adam and Chris made up years ago.

At night, the cool air coming off the water kept us fairly comfortable in the tent, although I was spooked when I spotted a sand-coloured crab coming out of a hole in the ground just beside us. We figured out that they sleep under the sand during the day and, at dusk, scuttle across the dunes to the beach to feed. As you probably know, crabs look a bit like naked spiders, have beady (but also cute) eyes and only walk sideways. A little unnerving to have them motoring around us while we slept.

Friday, we sought respite from the heat again at Ocracoke Coffee, a local hang-out filled with yoga instructors, sunburned surfers and piles of teenagers. We took a walk, afterward, literally down Back Road, strolling down to Zillie's, a gourmet food and wine shop with a great selection of beer and a four-seat bar. Naturally, Adam had to try a brew, so we cooled off, made friends with the owners and got a little tipsy -- all before lunch. The Ocracoke way, we're told! Adam 'got all North Carolina' on the way back to the car by taking off his t-shirt to beat the heat. Of course, ladies have to keep their clothes on and suffer.

Next stop is Carolina Beach. Catching the ferry off the island Saturday morning.

Hatteras Island, North Carolina

North Carolina's 'Outer Banks' is a narrow strip of land, off the coast, in the water. Basically, it's a series of islands (the biggest being Hatteras), tied together with a patchwork of bridges and ferries. The most developed of its communities are Nag's Head, Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hill, which run one after another in a series of commercial, kitschy stores and restaurants, at the Northern part of the banks. Kitty Hawk, you might know, is where the Wright brothers first flew their flying machine in the early 1900s. On Wednesday, we listened to a ranger talk at the Wright Brothers Memorial before hiking up to the top. Afterward, we stopped at Jockey Ridge Stage Park, where a giant sand dune and high winds make it a popular kite launch. If, however, you can't get your kite line untangled, it's also fun to just race down the dune.

We were repeatedly warned about the heat before setting out on our trip. Admittedly, the afternoons are blazing hot and beaches offer little shade, so today we cooled off at a coffee house in Nag's Head before coming back for a swim across the dunes from our campsite. There were at least half a dozen stupid jelly fish in the water. Lucky for us, an all-American dad came along and started scooping them with a garden hoe and then dumping them unceremoniously into a shallow grave in the sand. "The kids will step on 'em," he explained. Didn't have to convince me!

The beach at Oregon Inlet is…interesting. People are allowed to drive their big old trucks onto the beach, so the shore is dotted with giant halftones on pumped up chassis. We had an interesting chat with our neighbour campers (a couple from France who are biking from Charleston to NYC) about the 'freedom' to drive trucks on beaches and how that relates to being American.

The next morning, we stopped at Pea Island Wildlife Refuge on our way to Ocracoke. It was early with clear light and a little breeze and we walked the path around the water and saw a white heron fishing for breakfast, purple martins, brown pelicans, plovers, a couple dozen land turtles and two giant sea turtles. Those last guys were prehistorically huge with pointy noses and spotted skin. That reminded us both that we I forgot to mention our sighting of two horseshoe crab shells/carcasses on Assateague Island. If you've never seen one, do a Google Image search. Pretty wild looking dudes!

Sand Spurs

Here are the small, but sticky little burrs that are everywhere near the beaches along the Outer Banks. They're called Coast Sand Spurs and they attach to the bottoms of your shoes, tent and the tender soles of your feet. One even sneaked into our tent and put a tiny hole in my new air mattress. They're actually kinda cute though!

Campcraft (Guest Post by Adam)

When I was younger, I was enrolled in Scouts. It was a great experience and I learned a tonne about living outside the comforts (and confines) of modem society. There was an achievement system based on badges, which as most of you could probably guess, I was REALLY into. One of the badges was Campcraft, a badge based on how well you could plan, use, and maintain a campsite. Anytime you are spending the night outside of your normal dwelling you are likely doing some sort of campcraft. Rearranging luggage in the trunk of your car, looking for unnecessary items to jettison from an overloaded backpack and starting a fire all fall into campcraft in my books. It's an acquired skill, but not a hard one for people who like to solve problems and make things comfortable.

Riva hasn't done a lot of camping in recent memory, which is why it surprised me that she suggest we camp during half our road trip. I was wondering how her campcraft would come along during the trip, or if the experience would just end in a litany of bug bites and tears. Day five has started and she has almost perfected her creature comforts by identifying strategic locations of DEET-laced bug dope, corralling all the 'night needs' into a small stuff sack and implementing an efficient garbage disposal strategy. Not to mention, being able to setup our tent in a sub five minutes, efficiency usually enjoyed only by seasoned outdoors people. Over the next few days, I'm sure she will meet the requirements to have earned her Campcraft badge.

As for me, I've been in charge of the keeping both us and our food cool in the American south in August. Not an easy feat when the temperature are regularly in the high 90s and low 100s. Keeping the food cool hasn't been exciting, buy ice, lug cooler out of trunk, put ice in the cooler, drain the icewater from the cooler in the morning and at night. Bulky, cumbersome, inefficient...the search for a better cooler will begin when we get back to DC. Lighter-weight, smaller, better insulated. We purposely planned the trip down the coast so we could spend lots of time at the beach and in the water and keep our temps cool through the afternoon. When night time rolls around and it's time to head to bed, it becomes a little more challenging. Our tent (MEC Tarn 2, best tent ever), is really well ventilated; however having two people sleeping on hot sand heats up the tent fairly quickly. We sweated it out on our first night in Oregon Inlet, but the following morning I discovered our neighbours had an interesting setup. A poor man's air conditioner: an icebox with a battery operated fan blowing the cool air onto them. We set out that morning for an outdoor store or bigbox store to find a battery operated fan. We ended up at Kmart (who knew they still existed?) and picked up a large and small "O2 Cool" battery operated fans. I can't remember the last time a bought D batteries, but I bought twelve of them that day (I bought Raymovac because my friend Michael Jordan used to endorse them). Next campcraft task was to rig them up inside our tent for optimal cooling convection. I placed the big fan by our feet to take advantage of the natural conical shape of our tent, and rigged up some bungee cords through the gear loft tabs to suspend the smaller fan. A few micro-adjustments later, and we have a great setup to keep us cool all night long.

The fan setup isn't exactly a roughing it, but the one thing I learned by trial and error in camping (and in life) is to always have the right gear for your activity.

Campdom

"You're going camping?"

My dear friend, Cathy, was incredulous when I reported this fact to her last week. Admittedly, part of our trip is in cities and we're staying in hotels. But for this first week, our home is a tent, bug shelter and car. Our kitchen is a collection of drippy, ice-filled coolers, a little tote filled with plastic sporks and tin foil and matches and our new 'jet boil' fuel-powered camp 'stove' (it's really just a system for heating water really quickly).

Now you know that I'm not the most enthusiastic camper, but this was actually my idea and I'm actually having tonnes of fun. Must be something to do with the private little campdom we've built here on the Southern end of Kitty Hawk. We're at the Oregon Inlet Campground, a 'medium-country' beach park with cold water showers and rustic camp sites set between the sand dunes. Just a short jog to the beach.

Course...it doesn't hurt that Adam bought us a huge bug shelter from L.L. Bean. Working like a charm.

Assateague Island, Maryland

First stop on our great American South road trip - Assateague Island, which is in both Maryland and Virginia. From DC, you get to the island by driving past Annapolis, across the long, winding Chesapeake Bay Bridge and further along, still, until you get to the bridge to Assateague. On the other side is a state park, where feral ponies graze along the highway and shrubby trees grow bent away from the ocean breeze. We camped for one night only, setting up our tent late (after swimming until dusk), cooking in the dark and then lying wide awake through the wildest thunderstorm either of us had ever witnessed. The cracks and booms over our heads had me shaking, but Adam was tough, even opening up the tent to re-stake the fly during the worst of it. It went on long enough that both of us had to pee...the only place to go was under the little vestibule between the fly and the tent. It was, um, an 'experience.'

Gorgeous island with warm, clean ocean water, a quiet beach and hot showers at the campground. We'll definitely be back, next time with our bikes.

Here We Go (A Guest Post by Adam)

19 days, 7 states, 1 driver, 1 passenger and a bright red Impala. We'll travel a route from DC to Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, back to North Carolina, a stop on the other side of Virginia and then back to DC.

For those of you reading the blog, Riva is running her comment contest again for this trip. 'Best' comment on any blog post related to the trip gets a prize from one of our destinations.

Both feet in, here we go!


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Two Soucies!

Two of our favorite Soucies are staying at our condo in DC, house sitting, cat sitting and living the good life. They arrived last Friday and we four spent the weekend swimming on the roof, eating crabs (Dad and Adam, not me!), shopping (Mom and I, not the guys), cooking awesome dinners and giant, Soucie-style breakfasts, playing multi-stage charades, touring around DC's famous sights (we all agreed Adam would make an excellent cabbie if his current career path falls through). It was immensely gratifying to see my parents having so much fun and to win their approval and feel their love and support.

Adam and I will spend the next three weeks driving down, down through the American South in search of pimento cheese, Carolina sweet tea, salty beach swimming, fried chicken dinners, and car camptopia.

Zaytina

I had a smoking hot date on Saturday. He had made reservations at the ultra chic, Zaytina, across from the National Portrait Gallery. Neither of us had been before, so we gawked over the menu together, awed by José Andrés' long lists of mezze, drawn from Turkish, Greek and Lebanese cuisines. In the end, we ordered a dish of smooth, cold baba ganouche; baskets of hot puffed pita; giant wild mushrooms sauteed with garlic, dates and almonds; and far too many cheeses (a soft sheep's alongside a slice of dripping honeycomb; another wrapped in tender vine leaves and served with tomato jam, a seared haloumi with preserved watermelon rind; young pickled walnuts and a mild feta, smooth as pate).

You can imagine that I was done in after, but my date couldn't resist dessert. Rose and chocolate ice creams with fluffy lemon zabaglione.

We walked home. ;o)

Happy Canada Day

Happy Canada Day from the Canadian Embassy in DC! We took Kevin and Sarah to the outdoor party for burgers, beer (Molsen Canadian, which we drank patriotically, but it's pretty bad!), flags, cake, a live broadcast of the celebrations on Parliament Hill, Oh Canada sung by the Memphis Boys Choir and a visit from a mountie (with whom Sarah and I posed quite stiffly, haha!)

It was fun and chic and the weather was gorgeous. I definitely think I'm cut out for this life! ;-) Now, onto the next party in Jen and Steve's backyard.