Congaree - Columbia

2021, Covid-19 is over and we are ready to go on vacation. Julia is almost potty trained, and Joanna is old enough to take whatever we throw at her. It is time to start up the yearly trek to National Parks once again. Time to go to one closer to home: Congaree National Park. At a mere 426 miles away from our house, it is significantly closer than several that we have already visited. But while it is one of the closest National Parks, we hadn't visited it because the main feature of the Park is the Congaree River that forms the southern border of the park. We definitely wanted to experience this park from the canoe, which wasn't possible for the few years that we had babies. This vacation also served a dual purpose. Daniel Logan was getting married on April 24th in Greenville, SC, which Stacy wouldn't miss for anything. We debated whether to take the vacation before or after the wedding, but it ended up making more sense to go to Columbia first and finish the trip to South Carolina with the wedding. 

We had made our reservation for a delightful little house on Lake Murray, just west of Lexington. This made it a fair drive to Columbia each day, but the lake was certainly a beautiful site each morning. We drove up on Tuesday. We made it there just in time for dinner. The water was still too cold to swim in, but the kids did have fun wading in the shallow water right outside.

Wednesday was the big day. After our breakfast, we left the house for a schedule packed so full that we wouldn't return to the house until 9pm. We arrived at our first museum just after 10am: The South Carolina Military Museum. This small 2 room museum on the SC National Guard base was a great way to start the day. We were the only people in the museum (besides the receptionist). Apparently, there is another large room that is usually open, but there was some construction going on while we were there that shut down half the museum. There was still a lot crammed in to that small room. From guns, to tanks, to battle miniatures, there was a lot to see. It took us approximately one hour to go through the museum, but that included a rather long bathroom break. It was during the break that we realized that while we had remembered the diaper bag, we had forgotten to fill it with diapers. All day out and not a single diaper. Since the house was about an hour away, this put a certain tension on the remainder of the day.

Undeterred, we went to our next destination: the South Carolina State Museum. This four story museum is the largest in the state and joins next to a large children's museum. When our kids were younger, we probably would have elected to spend the day in the other museum, but for the sake of our 3 older ones, we decided on the State Museum. The building was built in the late 1800s as a large textile mill, using the Congaree River as a power source. It was converted to a museum and opened to the public in 1988.

We ate lunch outside before going in to the museum. And then started through the large museum. The museum features a few different 4D movies, but we decided to skip them mostly due to worries over whether the two youngest would sit through them, but also the one we wanted to see the most would have made us late for dinner. There was still plenty to see. We started on the 4th floor which was the history floor. It contains collections of furniture from the 18th century, a telescope room, a frontier room, and 1950s style gas station playing music. This was definitely Julia's and Joanna's favorite exhibit, they jumped out of the stroller and started dancing while the rest of us took a short break. In the telescope room, they had one pointing at the sun, which allowed us to see the solar flare activity on a computer screen next to the telescope. The museum did not have staff around to answer questions, but there was an astronomer working with the telescope, and there was also a lady guarding the furniture room. I guess they had trouble before with people touching the furniture and needed somebody there to protect it. The weirdest room was the "face jug" room. In the post antebellum period, former slaves in the south developed a style of pottery where they would  create jugs with faces on them. Some would be grotesque, often they would be meant to represent somebody. It was a weird room, but interesting to learn about a kind of art that has mostly been lost to history.

Next we moved to the third floor, which continued the theme of history but was more focused on science and technology. This is where we learned the history of the building we were in, the importance of the timber industry to South Carolina, and got to stop and watch commercials from the 1950s & 1960s. The final exhibit on the floor was a traveling exhibit on science. It as a very hands-on experimental exhibit, featuring all sorts of cool science-y things. But because the world has gone crazy, every hands on exhibit is now a hands-off exhibit. So all the things we were supposed to touch and see the cool science things happen were removed to prevent us from killing people with our germs. The one thing that they left on display was the optical illusions, such as the old/young lady illusion, as well as the 3d images/magic eye, or which line is bigger illusions. 

Next came the 2nd floor and its focus on natural history. We were getting worried at this point, still with no extra diapers. The babies were sent to the bathroom often, and so far it was paying off, but we were sure our luck would run out soon. The 2nd floor started with a cool exhibit of T-Rexs. Then an explanation of the geography of South Carolina. The state is divided into 5 sections, the coastal zone, the swamps, the sandhills, the piedmont, and the blue ridge mountains. Columbia is right on the border between the swamps and the sandhills. Lake Murray is well within the sandhills but tomorrow we would be headed for the famous swamps of South Carolina. After that it was time to go to the car for a snack break. Everybody took a short rest before heading to the last part of the South Carolina State Museum: The Confederate Museum.

The final stop in the was on the first floor which housed the separate museum: The Confederate Relic Museum. This small museum holds hundreds of relics from the Civil War, all carefully displayed. One that I noticed was a small pocket Bible that had saved a man's life when it was struck by a bullet while he was holding it in his chest pocket. The back of the museum held a series of pictures from World War I, that had been converted into the old style red & blue 3D pictures. We didn't spend much time in the museum, and were about to leave when Joe Long, one of the curators, stopped us and started talking about the relics, and his favorite subject, General Maxcy Gregg. He had discovered that this fascinating general never had a full biography written, and he aimed to fix that problem. One of the interesting pieces that he left behind was a golden watch that he left to a black man who had served under him as an aid during the war. This was the aid that ran to get General Jackson as General Gregg lie dying from a bullet wound. The aid later recounted that Jackson led Gregg to Christ on his deathbed. Joe Long found that tale unlikely given that Gregg left the Church as a young man due to the unchristian behavior of its members and his profound lack of respect for General Jackson's leadership abilities. Mr. Long was truly captivated by General Gregg and talked about him at length without stopping for breath. But he was so excited about this obscure general, that we all listened with rapt attention, until Stacy finally spoke up to say we were going to be late if we didn't leave quickly. I don't know when the book will be written or the title, but based on the excellent storytelling, I would certainly recommend getting a copy of the Biography of General Maxcy Gregg by Joe Long.

Tripadvisor recommends Little Pigs Barbecue as one of the best places to get BBQ in Columbia. Since this was the only day that we were going to go out for a sit down dinner, we left the museum as quickly as possible to try it out. Several weeks previous, Stacy had called them to make sure that could accommodate her allergies and was assured that everything would be fine. Unfortunately, as we would learn upon arriving, she forgot to ask if they were open on Wednesdays. They weren't. After a quick google search, we decided to try Maurice's BBQ instead. We arrived at the small BBQ restaurant to be greeted by a pig with a smirk. He seemed to be hiding a secret from us, and we were unsure. But since I was hungry, we stopped and grabbed a quick dinner before heading for Church. I thought the BBQ was fine, but Stacy was unimpressed with the entire thing, and left the restaurant hangry.

Little Pigs Barbecue was on the far east side of Columbia, and Grace Baptist Church was in West Columbia, across the river. So we had to hurry to get there in time. Luckily traffic was good, so we had time to stop and get a picture of the State Capitol on the way. We arrived at GBC about 15 minutes early, which was very good because our kids were in 4 different buildings. The Church was quite large and very spread out, and since it was Wednesday night, there was no receptionist to guide us in getting the kids to their classes. But everybody made it and the services went well. This was Rebekah's first time experiencing Awana. Once Church was over, we made the drive back to our rental home and crashed in bed after an extremely busy day.