Charleston- Day One

We arrived Sunday afternoon at our official hotel destination- The French Quarter Inn. This hotel was all that we had hoped/expected and more. We pull into the entrance two hours early and ask if we can check in. The concierge was very friendly and said yes, come on in. While the bellhop gets all of our luggage out we go on inside to check in. Upon walking into the hotel we are welcomed by a spiral staircase that leads to the first floor lobby and a three-story atrium. Savannah, the front desk worker, gave us a friendly welcome and a complimentary room upgrade. Did I mention we checked in TWO hours early and our room was ready! We meet the bellhop on the elevator and head up to our third floor room. While we are checking out the room he unloads our luggage. (Side note: This part was a little weird, because if you haven't noticed this isn't a Holiday Inn, they do stuff for you here and well, we were helping the guy get all our luggage in and he was like "Don't feel like you have to help". And then there was the dilemma of do we tip him and how much.) After he leaves we can REALLY check out the room. It is amazing!! King bed, nice large bathroom, office area equipped with a desktop computer (a Windows machine- the only bad part :) ) and a private balcony overlooking historic downtown. We were running around like little kids talking about how awesome this was. We looked up the room we got and it is $50 more a night than the room we reserved- they must have known this was my birthday week because it was a FREE upgrade!

After we ooed and ahhed over our room we headed out to eat lunch and explore. Lunch was at Market Street Deli. It was a small local deli that had an assortment of salads, sandwiches and wraps. I had the chicken caesar salad and Jeremy had a turkey sandwich. We were hungry and it was close, quick and good. Now to explore the area- we headed back toward the visitors center to find maps and tour information. We walked a good 2 miles at least today. After our walk we headed back to the hotel to rest and get something cold to drink. Our hotel has an all day drink bar with the best lemonade I have ever tasted...and M & M's! So we had a nice little snack while we sat out on the terrace. 

We hung out in the room for about an hour and then headed out for dinner...in the rain. We were going to eat at Sticky Fingers but it was about 6 blocks from our hotel so we decided to stay closer since the radar was showing heavy rain. We ate at an Italian restaurant close to the hotel called Bocci's. It was a quaint little restaurant on Market Street with exposed brick walls and ambient Italian music. Jeremy and I shared the Bocci's Calzone. It was a good thing we shared because it was HUGE! After dinner we went across the street to MaggieMoos IceCream for dessert- chocolate ice cream with oreos! On our way back to the hotel it started thundering and lightening and raining harder so we ran back and had milk and cookies at our hotel. Apparently this is a pretty popular event because there was no skim milk left when we went down and most the cookies were gone but I can't complain because they were good!!!