Fall Break: Day 2 - Charleston

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Patriot's Point

On the roster for today was a visit to Fort Sumter. I didn't know exactly how long the tour would take, but expected it to take a good chunk of the day, so nothing else touristy was planned for this day. Daniel really wanted to go kayaking as a family- and his friend/co-worker in the area even offered to give us a tour- but the water was really too rough and choppy to make this happen. Good thing anyway, we ended up with a full day at Patriot's Point!

We arrived about 30 minutes after a tour departed to Fort Sumter and the next was in a couple hours. I should've done my research better on this one as I just assumed they'd have tours departing every 30 minutes. Turns out we could get tickets for the USS Yorktown which included a visit to the destroyer ship and submarine. This tickets were about the same price as the Sumter tours, so really a better deal. We started with the destroyer.

We were inside the the fire room in the first picture watching a video about how the men aboard the USS Laffey survived a Kamikaze attack and managed to get the ship back to port. It was really neat. Then Lenny, the guy pictured above and who started the film for us, ended up basically giving us a private tour around the destroyer because he served on it years ago! We really could've spent a lot more time there, but the kids were getting hungry and we had to feed them before heading to the Fort Sumter tour. So we went aboard the USS Yorktown, walked around a tiny bit on our way to the only food place onboard. It was not the best lunch ever, but filled bellies. 

After we returned, we took some time on the USS Yorktown and then went into the submarine, which was really cool, probably my favorite part.

I thought it was weird and seemed kind of random that a space module would be on exhibit on a Navy ship. Turns out the Yorktown picked up the Apollo 8 in the middle of the ocean after they returned stateside. Super cool!

We pretty much stayed until they were shutting the place down. What a great day! We got so much more than we bargained for and so much history. Honestly, I could've skipped Fort Sumter. Obviously, that was the reason we even came to this place, but it was my least favorite mostly because we only had an hour at the fort itself- the roundtrip boat ride was just as long or longer than time spent there. Plus it was in the middle of everything else- but that was due to lack of planning on my part. I enjoyed seeing Fort Sumter for its place in history; however, if I'd known going in, I would've been just as happy spending the whole day at Patriot's Point. And the rain held out just long enough again!