South Carolina Sky

Cross Country Trip, Days 16-18

Florence, South Carolina

The first time I felt like I was in the South proper was when we hit South Carolina's back-country roads, lined with old wooden houses and people rocking on their porches watching the cars go by.  Everything looked different. The topography was flatter, the clouds seemed low enough to touch, the blue of the sky much brighter.    

I can't say I loved South Carolina.  Finding decent vegan food was challenging in Florence, a small but spread out town of 30,000.   The only reason we stopped here was to see family.  Two of my twenty-two (yes, 22) first cousins live here and between the two of them they have 8 beautiful intelligent children whom I can never get enough of.  (Family is probably the only reason to visit South Carolina.  The state is still flying the Confederate flag (the flag of the Southern states which attempted to break away from the USA) atop its capitol building.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People continues to boycott the state for this.)

There wasn't much to do in Florence -- the cemetery takes top honors on TripAdvisor as the number one attraction, and the raceway is second, neither of which we visited.  There's a War Between the States Museum, which is only open Wednesdays and Saturdays, so we had to miss it.  I don't think we missed much because it's mostly a display of Civil War weaponry.  The website promises that employees will help you find your Confederate ancestor, and I'm pretty sure I don't have any since we didn't arrive in America until 1981.   I did find their voicemail kind of cute, and you might too.



While exploring the downtown area, which is undergoing a revival (for the last 10 years or so, apparently), we stumbled upon a well-dressed gentleman who cleans windows.  Unfortunately, he didn't speak much English so I couldn't find out his story but he's been a fixture of Florence for at least as long as the City has been trying to revive the mostly deserted downtown.  He might have been the inspiration for the mural outside the coffee shop whose windows he was cleaning.  Whatever his story, he's one cool cat.