How to Eat Steak, Fickle Photography, and Hippy Dogs.

I’m sitting here after having eaten too much, with no witty words to start out this post. Hopefully as I start writing my wit will find me. Or I will find it. Or something.

Last night, we went to visit Barkley, Jeremy and Woods in Charleston (20 minutes from where we are staying), and they fixed us this amazingly delicious and gourmet meal:
I seriously thought I would eat maybe a third of that steak. Nope. I ate about 83% of it. AND didn’t feel stuffed. It was a magic steak.

Actually, being the overanalytical people we are, Chris and I discussed the baffling un-overwhelmingness of our humongous steaks, and decided that serving salad and onions with steak is MUCH wiser than serving potatoes. We always feel compelled to make potatoes with our steaks, which are much more filling, and so never REALLY appreciate our steaks. But these – oh we SAVORED them.

I think I’m going to remember this steak-eating tip.

Oh, and I’ll remember that Jeremy and Barkley make an amazing steak meal. Maybe we just need them to make all our steak meals from now on.

And, since we didn’t get a postable picture of ourselves from our Atlanta trip, we tried again last night:
The guys, of course, got lucky and stayed behind the camera.

This morning, Chris and I loaded up our rented bikes,
and drove to Charleston to ride around and enjoy the old city. I’m not sure if we were allowed to do that with our rental bikes, but considering we never signed a single thing and our bikes just showed up at our condo from a phone conversation and a mailed check, we decided that if we don’t know the rules, we’re not responsible for following them.

Now. I have to share a bit of girl pride here.

Chris wanted to take a water bottle with us on our Charleston treks, but our rental bikes didn’t have drink holders. We were at Target the night before, and he was looking all around for some sort of bungee cord.

I saw a pack of Goody’s ponytail holders and told him that they would do just the trick. He looked at me very doubtfully and asked how that could be. I made girlish handmotions and poorly explained how they loop through each other and hold tight.

After unsuccessfully looking a bit longer for the bungees, he agreed to buy my ponytail holders, but told me that “he didn’t have much hope that it would work”.

However, a girl knows her hair products. It worked exactly as I planned, and perfectly:
That’s right. I think I might have impressed my engineer husband with my creative engineering. Maybe a little, anyway.

We started out our bike ride on the most amazing street. This was on one side of the road:

And this on the other side:

We ogled houses like this:
and gazed at parks like this.
Here are a few more of the amazing houses we saw. I’m telling you – if you’ve never visited a city in the Old South, it is an amazing experience.

Here is the customs house, which was also quite impressive:

And, because I’m all about the cultural quirks, right in the middle of the most cultural district (and across the street from that most impressive and official customs house), there was this one (and only one) very interesting utility pole:
What is that, you ask? Look closer:
Yes. Bubble gum. In all colors, and I’m sure, flavors. I found it fascinatingly photogenic, so I’m going to make you suffer through one more germ-filled picture:

Chris and I found some amazing stairs and got another nice stranger to take our picture:
Which absolutely drove me crazy. Photography is so cruel. I was feeling so good about myself after the last stranger took a photo that made me feel very good about myself:
and then that ivy-staired one made me look 50 pounds heavier. Why, oh why does photography have to be so fickle? Doesn’t it know that us women can’t take that kind of self-esteem roller-coaster?!?!

As another completely unimportant aside, I really hate the look of bulky tennishoes on me. Other people look great in them. Me, not so much. However, I have recently noticed that a sleeker, “track-style” tennishoe is coming in style. I think I may buy a pair of these for tennnishoe-needing-outdoor-activities very soon:Yes, Dad and Chris, I realize that this blog post has vain and girly asides. I’m on vacation and so am allowed to think about frivolous and shallow stuff. But I apologize. I promise I am done now.

So anyway.

We took a walk on the beach this afternoon and found a colony of some squirmy looking sea creatures:
Chris, being the more conservative one of the two of us, highly suggested that I not touch them in case they were some sort of stinging creatures.

However, curiosity finally got the best of me and I nudged one with my toe a couple of times. I was not stung. But they were oddly normal feeling and in general not satisfying. I mean, they looked cool, so I just assumed they would feel cool too.

We took our last bike ride at sunset tonight, which was glorious:
Last pic of the day. This one was just too good. Apparently Miss Emily and Barney aren’t the only quirky people in this town. There is at least one quirky Veterinarian and enough quirky pet owners to keep him/her in business:
That’s right. If you have a hippy dog, now you know where to take them.