A beautiful day in Charleston! We walked and walked, then took a carriage ride, had lunch and walked some more.

Our horse was a Belgian draft horse, a former Amish farm horse named Luke, and our guide had a master's degree in history so gave us a wonderfully informative tour.

 This is 82 Queen, where we ate lunch - a 300-year-old building.

And this is the shrimp salad I had for lunch - shrimp here are nothing like the mushy frozen ones we get in Kansas! The salad had kiwi, mango, pickled ginger - it was delicious.

There are streets and streets full of wonderful old houses - we rubber-necked up and down many of them.

 The house above is on the market now for $9 million!

 All the houses had little shady gardens behind them and buildings that once held kitchens, stables, carriage houses and slave quarters.

The iron work on some of the houses is beautiful - you can actually buy jewelry with some of the designs from the fences, gates and doors.

 Charleston is called the Holy City because the whole skyline is steeples and no building is allowed to be taller than the tallest steeple. Many of the churches are from the 1700s and the cemeteries are fascinating. The stones are a genealogist's dream - not just the name and dates but parents' and spouses' names and everything the deceased ever did in his life.

This is as close as we got to Ft. Sumter - standing on the wall at the Battery looking across at it.

Tomorrow is another travel day - a little further south to Savannah, GA.