Today, my beautiful wife Laura and I celebrated 3 years of marriage together.  We have spent 94,608,000 seconds together and every second has been enjoyed.  I couldn’t ask for a better life companion than Laura.  She is just fantastic.  Yes, I like to brag on her…deal with it 🙂  So how do you celebrate three years with the most amazing woman on the planet.  I’d say, take her to one of her favorite cities in the South.  So that’s what I did.  We had a wonderful weekend in Charleston SC last weekend to celebrate our anniversary because the actual day fell during the week.  There is just something about getting away from everything to really help you relax.  We had a fantastic time together and made some fun memories!

We left on Friday afternoon because Laura had a half day from work.  I’m am still on break from P.T. school.  We packed up our bags and headed off on I-20 to head toward the lovely, picturesque town of Charleston.  It’s not a far drive from Augusta so we arrived to check in at our hotel in about two and a half hours.  We actually stayed in North Charleston, not downtown, at the Hyatt Place.  It is a super nice hotel and we got a good deal on the room.  Ironically, it is the same hotel line where we stayed the night of our wedding before flying out to St. Lucia for the honeymoon.  So the place is super nice and decently priced.  After arriving and checking in we got some…a lot of brochures.  Laura loves them.  But she does not like to carry them.  My pockets were full and bulgy.  But the information was valuable as it helped us decide what to do while we were in town.  We decided we’d start be visiting downtown Charleston.  So we hopped in the car and drove on in to town.  I learned real quick that there is zero parking downtown except in public garages which cost like 3 dollars an hour.  Needless to say we spent several of our trip dollars on parking fees.  It was evening on Friday night and there was a bustle and an excitement downtown as the street lights were light and people were shopping on King street or exercising by the bay.  We just strolled around for awhile to get moving after our car ride.  We walked down King St and did some shopping.  We walked down many of the streets with the magnificently restored period homes.  And we walked by a starlit bay looking out towards Fort Sumter.  All the walking started to make us hungry so we walked back to a Mellow Mushroom to get some pizza since both Laura and I love having pizza on Friday nights.  It was so hot and delicious.  Perfect.  The only thing left to do on this night was to cap it off with a movie.  Dinner and a movie just sounds better than dinner.  So we GPS’ed a theatre and decided to see Sherlock Holmes.  I really like the movie and thought it was fun and entertaining.  I think Laura liked it less especially as I looked over and she was catching some zzz’s.  In her defense, the theater chairs were the most amazing chairs I have ever sat in.  The were the perfect blend of soft and firm and contoured.  And they rocked back and forth.  They really could put you to sleep!  By the end of the movie both of us were tired so we drove back to our hotel.  Not before getting pulled over by a N. Charleston police officer, however.  Apparently, the intersection of the highway and the street our hotel was on has several signs that say do not turn Right on red.  So being a visitor to the area, in a new area late at night and tired, I did not notice the supposedly “many” signs that officer Perkins said I declined to heed.  We played the “we are visiting on our anniversary” card and were very polite.  Fortunately, officer Perkins was merciful to the weary visitors and let us off with a warning.  Literally, 45 ft further, I turned into our hotel parking lot.  Evening one with beautiful bride = success!

The next day we actually slept in a little bit!  It was miraculous.  We had a very lazy morning sans the fact that we decided to work out together in the hotel fitness area.  But after a workout, some continental breakfast and showers, we were ready to get our day started.  The hotel is strategically located right across from the outlet malls and that is were we started.  Laura got some great new clothes and I actually participated in buying a new sweater for myself.  After shopping, we headed downtown and had a late lunch at a very good restaurant we had walked by the night before called, Toast.  It was fantastic.  We were going to try and not eat to much because we had reservations for a nice restaurant called Hank’s at 6:15.  But we were hungry and the food at Toast so good, that we just ate.  After Toast, we walked through the downtown market and bought a cool ornament for our Christmas tree.  We then walked up to the big park where a local festival was taking place.  Did I mention that we had beautiful weather the entire trip.  Well we did.  We drove back to the hotel to relax for awhile and rest from all of our walking.  We ended up just hanging out in our room for hours just watching tv in bed and since neither of us were hungry, we cancelled our Hank’s reservation.  We had heard and read about this cool Christmas light event in Charleston so we decided to go and check it out.  We still weren’t hungry yet and it was about 7 so we decided to go to the Christmas light display before dinner.  Well, we learned that this display is ridiculous and super popular because as we drove to where it was located, traffic was way way backed up.  Since we still weren’t hungry we were like “hey, let’s just wait in line and eat afterwards.”  But as the fates would have it, we got really hungry about 45 minutes into us waiting in stand still traffic.  We had no choice but to turn around, give up our position in line, and eat at this little place we drove by called Melvin’s BBQ.  The food was actually super delicious and probably kept us from getting really annoyed at each other as we just sat in traffic.  By the time we finished dinner, the line for the display was pretty much over and we drove through miles of Christmas light displays before heading back to our Hotel.

Sunday morning was also a relaxed morning, especially since we didn’t have to get up early and teach sunday school.  So we had some liesure time and devotion time together to get the day started.  We sadly, had to pack up our suitcase and get the room back in order to check out.  We checked out just before our deadline at noon and we went back downtown one last time to eat at this little brunch place we had heard about called Fleet Landing on the water.  Again, a small establishment, but amazing food!  It used to be an old navy supply building, but was renovated to be a restaurant.  However, the kept the Navy/nautical themes.  After brunch/lunch we had to make one last stop at the outlet mall before heading home.  After that last stop we headed home to Augusta.  It was fantastic trip with a fantastic woman.  And I am excited for the years and experiences to come with Laura!