Sightseeing Day

We did a lot of sightseeing on Friday, since it was the last day before we left. We drove down to the Charleston Tea Plantation on Wadmalaw Island, and on the way we stopped to see Angel Oak. It is this absolutely enormous live oak, which they estimate at over 1500 years old. It was pretty cool to see.





Then we continued to the tea plantation, the only one in all of North America. We went on a tour of the grounds (on a trolley) to see the plants, which are dormant in the winter. We also saw the Green Giant, their custom harvester. After (or before?) our tour of the grounds, we toured the factory. It only runs in the summer, when they can actually harvest the plants, but we did get to see all the machinery as well as a few short videos on how they process the tea. Overall it was very informative. Afterwards we sampled some of the tea, and of course A and I had to buy many boxes of it.





Our final tour of the day was Fort Moultrie, which I thought was very cool. My favorite fact about the fort was that the British couldn't destroy it during the Revolutionary War, because the palmetto logs out of which it was built absorbed the shock of the cannonballs. The cannonballs either bounced off or stuck in the logs.