Kiawah, Thursday

Oh... We're running out of days.

The sun is brightly shining, contrary to weather predictions. We've decided to stay local today. Leftover beautiful burger from King Street Grill for breakfast, then a late morning beach ride sets the leisurely pace. Then, we shower and hang out, leaving around 1:30pm for a short drive to Stono Farm Market and a late lunch at the Tomato Shed Cafe.

Super-casual kitchen table ambience with great, honest farm-style cooking. "Who's Your Farmer?"

BZY chooses a crabcake with three sides--strawberry pickled beets, Geechie Boy Grits, tomato pie. While I go with the vegetable plate; choosing the beets, the grits, the tomato pie, and a puréed sweet potato with goodies, including pecans. We both have homemade lemon chess pie--excellent crust and very sweet lemoni-ness. I love me some lemons.

After lunch we drove to the Charleston Tea Plantation, caught the last trolley tour of the day (3:30pm), and totally enjoyed Charlestonian and former history teacher John Kennedy's narration. Which is delightfully interspersed with recorded commentary by Bill Hall, founder and still owner (co-owner with the Bigelow Tea people) of America's only tea garden.

We'd planned to visit the Angel Tree, but the skies opened up with another unusual deluge of summer rain. Rain's been ubiquitous here in the Low Country of late. Our charming little tea shrubs need only 52" of water per year. Preferably, one-per-week. So far, we've mostly managed to run between the raindrops and schedule around the frequent cloudbursts. The exception being our initial beach bike ride which was VERY wet.

I'm cool with a very quiet late afternoon and at-home evening featuring our first T.V. viewing of the week (Anthony Bourdain), and snacking on what's here--cheeses, almonds, peaches, chocolate.

V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N.