Thawed out

Well, as I was falling to sleep on Thursday night, I was beginning to believe we were headed to Portland, Ore. Not for any particular reason, other than that I couldn't think of any other place in the country that might be experiencing a high of 50 degrees, and I was forcing myself to think out of the box, since Matt said I would NEVER figure out where we were headed.

When we jumped in the car on Friday morning, though, we began heading in exactly the opposite direction of the airport. So that eliminated Oregon. Matt pulled over at the Donut Cutter up the street from our house, because "we need snacks for the trip." How could I protest? I'll have a honey-dipped chocolate donut, please.

As we continued on our way, Matt asked me to pull out the U.S. atlas, as apparently he needed help navigating. His home state? That sounds suspicious. Then he said "What's that piece of paper," which lay on top of the state of South Carolina. Well, it happened to be my boarding pass for a flight to Charleston, SC.

Interestingly, over the past few weeks, Matt had listened to me moan over these photos of Charleston. I tried to not want to go, tried to be content with all the wonderful trips and things I have gotten to do this year, but that didn't get me very far. So I just tried to forget about what I had seen. After all, I had been to Charleston when I was young. I didn't need to go again, right?

Wrong! It was most certainly where we needed to go. Despite the fact that Charleston was experiencing record cold temperatures, we turned on the optimism switch and declared that we were quite fortunate to be skipping out on record cold temperatures in metro Detroit, where the weekend low was -15 degrees.

Plus, record cold temperatures in Charleston affords visitors like us plenty of time to walk a little, eat, eat, run, eat, eat, drive a little, eat, eat, run ... eat. That basically how the weekend played out. Oh, and we shopped.

Matt's coworkers told him he was setting the bar high when he planned a first anniversary trip to one of America's most romantic cities. They're right. But is that really such a bad thing?

(We didn't get too many good pictures, but I'll try posting a few more this week.)