We were docked about an hour before I went back up to the office of the Maritime Center in Charleston to ask for a second week on our reservation. At $8.75 a foot per week meant that we were only paying $300 a week to be tied to the dock in downtown Charleston by all the action with electricity, water, and best of all unlimited free laundry.

We were there on a mission, rest, catch up on work stuff, do some easy boat work, and enjoy a thanksgiving dinner with the daughters of a dear friend.

Charleston is an interesting old city and I wish I could say that we ate out in the fabulous restaurants every night and followed it up with the live music that is everywhere. Sadly we didn’t have enough cash to make those things happen. We were still dealing with the extra costs of the alternator and the autopilot repair.

The maritime center is quite conveniently located, a short walk (and shorter scooter ride) will get you propane, groceries, and just about everything else you’ll need.

I used our first day there to hit the nearby grocery store and then essentially to rest but day two had me hunting for the “laptop cafe” of the town and I found it in Second State Coffee on Beaufain St. It seemed that everyone in the place was working on a laptop or tablet. It helps that Charleston is a college town with 14 colleges and universities in town.

Certainly a fun, youthful, and energetic city while still feeling quite small.

My initial thought was that we’d have the girls come to the boat for a thanksgiving dinner but they beat us to the punch and invited us over. I was very impressed with how well of a thanksgiving dinner they put together, no doubt at all who their mother is.

Sadly we didn’t get to see them much during our stay since the oldest is in school and working and the younger of the two was only there a short time.

Most of our days were fairly predictable as we do the same thing in just about every city or town we visit. Up, have some tea with breakfast, pack up our backpacks, head to the local cafe to get school and university work done, lunch, if there’s still work to do relocate to the local library or work from that boat, then do any errands such as groceries, runs to the hardware store, or other such things, then work on any boat repairs needed, then early to bed.

Even so Charleston is a beautiful city to walk around through, and in addition to seeing the daughters of one of my best friends I was able to see one of my mother’s oldest friends who lives nearby and was in town for the day. She found us at the cafe one random day and we were able to meet up and catch up.

I can’t recommend the city enough, but it is one of the cities where if you don’t have the right dinghy it’s best to get dock space. The current is WILD and you’ll want to time your docking and departure for slack tide which at the Maritime Center is just after the tide change.

With our dinghy having only one horse power on it’s little engine we would not have been able to fight the current to get to the dinghy dock, which is of course at the maritime center. There is a $5 fee but we saw the fee waved more often than it was collected, no pattern, I would probably just not seek to pay the fee and if anyone said anything I’d apologize. They do take cash or cards for the fee and when the one person I saw tried to pay with cash the guy laughed and said he was the first to pay in cash all year since everyone else had paid using a credit or debit card. The $5 fee gives you shower access, I’m not sure about laundry access. I’ll be sure to ask next time I’m there.

We also spent the two weeks washing every bit of everything we could think of on the boat. From our clothes to our bedding to our out of season clothes that we don’t wear often to the blankets that we have over the seating since our cushions are so torn up.

Everything was washed and we really took advantage of the free laundry.

Charleston is certainly one of my favorite cities. And a place I look forward to visiting. It’s a place that could be fun to winter and really get to know.

When the time came to leave we had an easy exit with the tide and turned our way south to Cumberland Island GA where we hung out for another two weeks with the wild horses.