Bravo tries to make friends

Bravo makes friends with people very easily. He finds it a little harder to make friends with dogs. Often, he just ignores, or at most puts up with, the overtures other dogs make. Occasionally, you can tell he wants to play with another dog, but doesn't know how to get started. If the dog he's chosen is playing with other dogs, he hangs around the fringes and occasionally makes a half-hearted move to join in. Usually it doesn't work very well. He's kind of a dork that way.


Today at the dog park, he found a Catahoula that fascinated him. I forgot I had a camera the first time he played with Gray, which is a shame as it was very cute. A little later on, Bravo approached him again.

Bravo followed him into the fenced portion

Other dogs came over to check them out.
The Rottweiler lives with the Catahoula

Bravo was really having fun. The Catahoula was tolerating him. According to his owner, all the dogs kinda crush on Gray.


Check out what Google + did with my photos - they gave me 3 Bravos!

Anyway, we were very happy to get out to the park today - it rained all day yesterday.

An American Tea Plantation

As many of you know, I am a fan of tea, especially black tea. So when I discovered that the only tea plantation in North America is Charleston Tea Plantation, I was excited to visit.

Tea (Camellia Sinensis) likes hot, rainy weather, so the climate here is pretty perfect. It's also what we had for our visit. There's a tour of the processing plant, and a trolley tour of the tea gardens. It rained off and on during the trolley tour, which was only a problem when it rained hard enough that we wanted to close the windows.

Russ made a new friend - Waddy the frog

Russ had been to a tea plantation in China, where they used hundreds of workers to hand-pick the tea. Here, they developed a harvesting machine, and only have 4 field workers. They rotate the fields so one field is harvested each day for about 20 days, and then they start again at the beginning.

The machine that allows them to use very few workers

Tea plants

Ominous clouds over the tea fields

All tea comes from the same plant, but there are different varieties. The Charleston Tea Plantation blends several varieties together, all from their own fields.

Only the top 3 leaves are used  for tea (the "flush")

Baby tea plants in the greenhouse

Several different types of tea were available to try in the gift shop. They had both cold and hot tea, sweetened and unsweetened. One of the special kinds is "first flush", from the first cutting of the season. It was very flavorful, so I bought some along with some green mint tea.  I also bought a pretty new mug with tea strainer and lid.

Some of my purchases. A cool new mug and 2 kinds of tea.

The tea isn't technically organic, since they do use some nitrogen fertilizer. However, it's close enough to pass Whole Foods stringent requirements, and they will soon be selling American Classic Tea at some locations. In the meantime, you can always order online: Charleston Tea Plantation products 

The sky was quite dramatic

A cool oak tree

Just for fun, a pretty flower. No idea what kind.

A very touristy day

For our first real tourist outing, we chose a carriage ride. Apparently, routes are assigned randomly as you depart, and there are also several different companies, so conceivably you could do this several times and never have quite the same tour. Our horse was Dave. I don't remember the tour guide's name.

On the tour

Me and Dave

Our tour went down Legare St (pronounce Legree, I think) and along the Battery. Our guide was interested in ironwork, so that was a focus. There are certainly plenty of beautiful examples, but they are hard to photograph from a carriage. Maybe I'll get better pictures later on foot.

An interesting door knocker

"Sword Gate"

After the tour, we tried out the "joggling board"  in the office.It's kinda fun to make it bounce up and down. Supposedly courting couples would use the joggling to slide together until they were nearly touching. I didn't find it slid very well, but maybe we didn't joggle hard enough.

Just joggin'

For a perfect end to the tourist experience, we had ice cream at Kilwin's.

Restaurant Week

Charleston is known for great food. We were lucky enough to arrive during Restaurant Week, when various restaurants offer prix fixe dinner menus - 3 courses for $20, $30, or $40. A little googling tells me 140 restaurants are participating this year, and some offer lunch as well. It's actually a bit more than a week, starting 9/3 this year, with today being the last day.

Since Russ was here before I was, he made an executive decision to make reservations for both last night and tonight. This late in the week, there were not many openings, so we ate quite late - after 9 last night and about 8 tonight.

At Blossom on Saturday

We walked to Blossom on Saturday. It's a lovely little restaurant, but rather loud. Didn't help that we were seated next to a large group of guys, with another large group right behind them.

Blossom's Chicken with Waffles

I thought the Chicken with Waffles and blueberry sauce was an interesting appetizer. The chicken was fried, but quite light. Overall, the dish was a little sweet for me, but very good. Russ had the fried calamari with peach sauce, which he quite enjoyed. Our entrees were Pan Roasted Mahi Mahi (me) and Cornmeal Dusted Catfish for Russ. For dessert we both had Banana Cream Pie - cute little individual pies that weren't quite what we expected, but were still quite good.




Tonight we went to Oak Steakhouse. We were running a little late, it looked like rain, and they'd called to tell us they offered valet parking so we drove. I know, we'll try not to make it a habit.

Milk Chocolate Cheesecake at the Oak

The restaurant was quite chilly, so we both ordered the Tomato Bisque soup to start, which was quite good. Then Russ had the Market Catch, Grouper on a bed of quinoa with cherry tomatoes. I had the Filet Mignon over mashed potatoes and spinach. It was the best steak I'd had in some time. Very tender, even though I order it well done. The Oak is justifiably proud of their steaks, and I highly recommend them. Dessert was also delicious - Milk Chocolate Cheesecake with salted caramel sauce, chocolate cookie crumbles and vanilla whipped cream. It was beautiful, too - sorry I didn't manage to take a picture before digging in! It was just too tempting.

It's a good thing the week is over. So many delicious choices, but then you have these 3 courses and so naturally you have to eat all three. I'd be gaining weight again quickly if it went on much longer.

Welcome to a new adventure!

Bravo and I arrived in Charleston today. I'm going to try to write here more frequently as we get started on our new life.

The last 5 days have been busy:

• watched the packers box everything up on Monday, and cleared out all the leftover food with Jason's help
• had dinner with Jason and Gaea (they've now gotten me to eat both Mexican and Indian in the last 6 months - by giving me no choice, basically. Thanks, guys! No, I don't mean that sarcastically)
• got my car fixed on Tuesday while the movers were loading up everything. This was important as it meant I had cruise control for the 20+ hour drive.
• vacuumed the entire house and cleaned the refrigerator
• packed up the car and drove to Baraboo
• spent Wednesday with Karis - met Curry the baby Sarus crane, went to see Lark and introduced him to Bravo, hiked at Devil's Lake
• Thursday we drove from Baraboo to Indianapolis and played in the 100 Acre Park at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Saw Funky Bones (from The Fault In Our Stars).
• found out the reservation for that night was actually in Cincinnati instead of Indianapolis, so didn't actually get settled until after 9 that night
• drove to Montreat, NC on Friday, arriving in a rainstorm. Managed a walk down to Lake Susan around 9 pm during a break in the storm
• took another walk around Montreat this morning for about an hour before heading out for the last 4 1/2 hours of driving
• took Bravo for his first walk in the 90-degree heat this afternoon
• unpacked the car and realized that a large portion of what I brought isn't needed in our rental and will have to be put in storage

The rental house is really cute. I love the Charleston style with a side porch and back screened porch. We definitely did not need to bring really anything other than clothes, so much will go into storage. It's a small house, so will be a good exercise in minimalist living. 

I've arrived at the end of Restaurant Week, so maybe I'll write about that tomorrow. For now, I should go find space for some more stuff I brought, but don't really need...