My wife and I got engaged in January of 2019. As we set out with the wedding planning, we began to appreciate the truth of the idiom “the bachelor party is for your friends, the wedding is for your family, the honeymoon is for you.” In retrospect, we loved our respective bachelor / bachelorette parties (see; San Antonio). That said, we had the most fun as a couple planning our honeymoon.
The plan was ambitious, to say the least. And, most importantly to me, it involved traveling to the location on the top of my to-do list; Ireland. We planned to hit Ireland, England, and Scotland in one fell swoop. As our work schedules and life plans started to form around the wedding, we realized it would be untenable to take two weeks off of life to island hop the Irish Sea. So we added a component – the increasingly popular “mini-moon” – and planned to spend three or four days in Montreal in the days following the wedding, scheduled in June of 2020. The great European pub crawl was accordingly set for the summer of 2021.
2020 began and the appetizer for our travels approached; my brother had planned my bachelor party for New Orleans (this becomes important later). It was early March, 2020. Tickets to the Big Easy were booked, debauchery was planned, and visions of gumbo danced in our heads. Enter COVID.
COVID delayed our wedding by over a year, along with the affiliated trips. We were able to get married in September of 2021, but begrudgingly realized that international travel was not going to be possible anytime soon. A new plan took shape; if we couldn’t leave the country, we should finally see the country. Specifically, we wanted to go South, and settled on two (and eventually, three) cities: Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia.
Day One
Filled with marital bliss and fresh off a hangover that tags along with holding your wedding at a brewery (visit Brown’s Brewery if you’re ever in Troy, NY), my wife and I caught an early flight out of Albany, NY and landed in Charleston in the early afternoon. We had talked to friends and done a lot of research, and knew that King Street was the place to stay. We picked the Hyatt House Charleston/Historic District, and were very happy with the access it provided to the things we wanted to do around the city (we’ll get to the rooftop bar later).
After we had gotten to the hotel and checked in, we were in desperate need of some food. It’s important to mention that we chose Charleston, in large part, because we had been told it was a culinary mecca of Southern cuisine. With this in mind, I, naturally, found the first pizza shop we passed on King Street. While it lacked the elegance of some of the other restaurants we dined at, if you’re looking for great pizza and good beers, Uptown Social is the place for you. It boasted a great selection of craft beers and featured a rooftop bar.
From there, we spent the night exploring our host street. The highlights included two bars we really enjoyed; Prohibition (think upscale cocktail lounge) and Republic (beer garden with mellow live music). For desert, we stumbled upon a displaced staple of drunken college nights in upstate New York, Insomnia Cookies.
Day two
Day two started with a short Lyft ride to the ferry for Fort Sumter. I’m a history nerd, so I’ll resist the impulse to write about all the Civil War facts we learned over the course of the tour. Broad strokes – it was an extremely important fort needed to control the port city of Charleston, and it is infamously credited with being the scene of the first shots fired during the Civil War (fun fact for baseball fans – it is the fort where Abner Doubleday was originally stationed). I’m sure by the end of my discussions of these cities I will overuse the phrase “must-do,” but I would place this tour firmly towards the top of the list of excursions we indulged in over the course of the trip. The fort itself was both imposing and awestriking, and the ferry ride made for a relaxing glide across the Charleston Harbor (watch for dolphins). The trip was also pretty cost effective and relatively easy to get to (the directions in the confirmation email were a little confusing; just head to the aquarium and it’s right next door).
We grabbed lunch at Fleet Landing, a boardwalk-style seafood haunt at which we ate some fresh crab cakes and triggerfish (I had never heard of these, either). We followed up lunch with a walk through the Charleston City Market (local vendors in an extended, open-air pavilion) and a quick trip to the aquarium. We stopped at a bar on the way back to the hotel – Charleston Beer Works – and then got ready for dinner.
The one place that everyone who had been to Charleston recommended was Husk. Husk is a series of restaurants developed by the acclaimed chef Sean Brock; while it originated in Charleston, it has since expanded to Nashville and Savannah (this is called foreshadowing). It embodied fine Southern charm from the moment we sat down at the attached garden bar as we awaited our reservation. As we sipped our caringly created cocktails, we were ushered to our outdoor, balcony seats, where glasses of champagne greeted us as we were congratulated for our recent nuptials by our waitress (my wife had mentioned it was our honeymoon when we booked the reservation a few weeks prior to our trip. While we’re on that point, book your reservation here a few weeks prior to your trip. It fills up very quickly). I would recommend trying the cornbread as an appetizer and the Amberjack as an entree, but I can’t promise they’ll be available – the restaurant prides itself on changing the menu daily to reflect the freshest regional ingredients they can procure (so much so that menus on our tables contained a personalized congratulatory message). What I can promise is that you will get a great meal; we were blown away by the service, atmosphere, and, most importantly, quality of food.
As day two became night two, we charted our course for two local breweries: Holy City Brewing and Revelry Brewing Co. Both required another Lyft ride to get to, but proved to be worth the trip. We particularly enjoyed the vibe and aesthetic at Revelry – a modern industrial motif extended over two stories and a rooftop bar, and the brewery had a great selection of merchandise to help you remember that you drank a lot when you were in Charleston.
Day Three
Charleston is only a two hour drive from Savannah, so we planned on renting a car to make the trek. As our itinerary came together, we decided to rent the car a day early so that we could hit up some locations outside of the city limits without signing over our wedding checks to Lyft. Our first stop of the day was the Boone Plantation.
The Boone Plantation was equal parts haunting and beautiful. The plantation did not hide from its baleful history. The tour guides were very well versed in the plantation’s past, and were not reluctant to share accurate portrayals of what life was like for all the plantation’s occupants. They also exuded pride as they spoke about the reformation of the grounds into a vast and productive farm. The highlight among the tours was the hayride-style wagon ride around that undulated through the sprawling complex. The highlight of the day was driving down the famed Avenue of Oaks. Whether you know it or not, you’ve probably seen the Avenue of Oaks – the tour guide mentioned that several shows and movies film at the location every year (my wife even beat the tour guide in telling me that The Notebook was filmed there).
The next stop was a trip to the beach. When you Google Charleston beaches, the first suggestion will undoubtedly be Folly Beach. As we were leaving straight from Boone Hall and did not want to compete with the midday competition at the uber-popular ocean spot, we opted for a smaller, closer town; the Isle of Palms. The quaint, oceanfront town had a decent boardwalk and plenty of spots to refuel with food and drinks. We got lunch at Coconut Joes, a quintessential beach bar complete with a second story balcony overlooking the ocean. Overall, we enjoyed solid food (definitely get the Grouper Bites as an appetizer), good drinks (my wife enjoyed the Lowcountry Lemonade, a frozen cocktail perfect for a hot southern beach day), and a fairly vacant beach. While I can’t personally speak to the advantages or disadvantages of Folly Beach, Isle of the Palms is a good alternative if you’re looking for a less busy option.
After the beach, we made our way back to the hotel to get ready for the evening. We had dinner plans at another highly recommended restaurant – 5 Church (now known as Church and Union) – but had some time to enjoy the hotel’s rooftop bar prior to our reservation. The bar was called Pour, and had a unique concept in which you were given a lanyard with a unique QR code. That code could be scanned at any number of the self-pour taps around the tasting room. The lanyard is linked to your credit card, and you are charged commensurate to the size of your pour. Needless to say, we nearly missed our reservations, in no small part because the bar also happens to be the tallest rooftop bar in the City.
Husk is probably my second favorite restaurant I’ve ever been to. Number one belongs to 5 Church/ Church and Union. True to its name, the restaurant is contained within an old church, complete with stained glass windows, an impressive bar, and the text of “The Art of War” adorning its ceiling. The food was phenomenal, and where most “fancy” restaurants tend to skimp a bit on portion size, we left 5 Church without an ounce of room for dessert. We split a charcuterie board that could have been a meal by itself before indulging in filet mignon and fried chicken with a side of crawfish risotto (tip – when you’re making your reservation, specify that you’d like to sit in the main room; the side room lacks the splendor of the old church).
We wrapped up our last night in Charleston by walking around the city, seeing the oft-instagrammed Pineapple fountain, and stopping in for some live music at Johnny King’s, a fun, dueling piano bar, at which I could show my new wife how much I loved her by continuously bribing the musicians into playing her favorite songs.
Day four
As much as we looked forward to Savannah, we were in no rush to leave Charleston. We spent our last morning walking through the city, exploring the fittingly named Rainbow Row (a series of brightly colored townhouses), and grabbing brunch at one final Charleston essential – Poogan’s Porch (the biscuits with sausage gravy is a necessity).
As we finished our French toast and fried green tomatoes and made small talk with our waitress, she told us to make sure we visited a specific bar in Savannah – a classy speakeasy, with its entrance contained in the backroom of an unassuming Chinese restaurant – known as the Peacock Lounge. But more on that later.
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