The Dress Mystery Continues & The Hunley - April 11th

Saturday was check-in for our house rental in Beaufort, SC (about 45 minutes North of Savannah, GA), so we wanted to get up relatively early to have breakfast, visit the H.L Hunley We went to the continental breakfast at the hotel and ironically...the men who were dressed up in Alice-in-Wonderland garb were still in full garb, so we concluded that is probably wasn't a costume party the were headed to the night before - my only pet-peeve is that if you are going to wear it, you might have picked a more flattering outfit!

We then hit the road to see the Confederate Submarine H.L. Hunley Museum (www.hunley.org)in Charleston - something that we had all heard about for sometime and thought we should check it out.

In 1864, the Hunley, was the first submarine to sink an enemy ship in combat - the same night it was unfortunately lost at sea.

It's kind of an "odd" museum in the sense that there's a huge waiting area with information and displays about the Hunley that you get to walk around and view while you wait to see the actual Hunley - which only takes about 15 minutes and you couldn't take pictures, so we were a bit disappointed in.

Our one big gripe was when we arrived and went to purchase the tickets the cashier charged our credit cards, gave us the tickets and then proceeds to tell us that the next 3 tours were sold out and we had to wait 1.5 hours to see the Hunley!

Realistically the waiting area/museum would take about 45 minutes tops, so we were miffed, but made due. Hey, we did learn that they made a movie with Armand Assante about the Hunley - so that was worth it!

When we finally got to view the Hunley it was obviously sad because the entire crew perished and you saw how small the sub was and subsequently the crew were in tight quarters.

The gentleman who gave the tour was quite a character, named "Pappy", who was a WW II veteran. He was pretty amusing, particularly when, half way through his spiel he went on a 2 minute diatribe about how the federal government was ridiculous to close the Charleston Naval Base and that they were in fact morons. It was a little touch-and-go for awhile, but then Pappy recovered and finished his speech.

I'm glad we went to the museum, but we decided that once was enough.