For our last night in Charleston, we enjoyed she crab soup, shrimp three ways (bbq, fried, scampi), and tons of hush puppies at Hymans. A memorable meal at a historic establishment.

The following morning we packed up the car and drove through The Citadel – a nearby D1 college and an impressive campus with its all white buildings and military vehicles about.

There was a lot to see during the four hour drive on the two-lane highway up the coast: changing vegetation, all different styles of homes, farms, plenty of chain stores and places to eat. We stopped at a farmers market for some peaches and bag of boiled peanuts. Typically Paul loves peanuts in the shell but these didn’t taste good to any of us: the shell was soft, the peanut itself didn’t have a lot of flavor, and Big D keeps saying they tasted like coconut.

As we continued to head north, we stopped in Wilmington, NC to stroll around the Riverwalk and grab some lunch (and fudge!). We then made our way over to the UNC Wilmington campus which was impressive and larger than we were expecting.

A short while later we arrived at our second destination of the trip: Surf City on Topsail Island in North Carolina.