Charleston III: Fortified

Reading this week:

The French Mind by Peter Watson

If the previous day was all about the agricultural history of Charleston, free or otherwise, this day was going to be all about coastal fortifications. The real big destination of the day was Fort Sumter, but that was only part of the day of course, and so the first thing we did was arrive at Fort Moultrie pretty much the moment it opened. We had wanted to take a bit of a look at Sullivan’s Island, and also of course Fort Moultrie and Fort Sumter represented an interlocking system of coastal defenses, so how can you really understand one without understanding the other?

*Display at the Fort Moultrie Visitor’s Center discussing the ties between Sierra Leone and Sullivan’s Island via the slave trade.*

At Fort Moultrie first we briefly checked out the visitor’s center where I was most interested to find a display on Bunce Island. Then it was across the street to the fort itself. It was a fairly quick wander around, though what I liked best about the fort is that you still got shipping traffic coming in. From the perspective of the fort you can watch as these gigantic container ships slide on by. The shipping back in the day would have been a bit smaller, but it really drives home the strategic location of the fort and how you could use it to fire cannons at ships. One of the most exciting parts of the fort is the World War II command center they still have buried deep in the heart of it. You go down through these blast door sorta things and they have the command center laid out like it would have been, wild-looking coffee machines and all. This is where the duty officers would have plotted out firing cannons at those ships I mentioned.

From there we zoomed off back to downtown Charleston to the Fort Sumter Visitors’ Center, where the ferry departs from. There were a lot of people visiting Fort Sumter that day! Presumably because it was such a nice day and also a holiday. We had a lovely ride over to the fort, with the guide explaining some aspects of the harbor along the way. Once at Fort Sumter we of course once again wandered around, admiring Fort Moultrie now from afar. The wind was pretty blustery which made it chilly, but still right in the middle of the harbor on a sunny day makes for stunning views.

Now, you see, although this was my super amazing wife’s first time at Fort Sumter, I had been before back when I lived in Charleston, so nothing here was too surprising. The first time around I was flabbergasted to find a WWI-era fort right in the middle of the Civil War perimeter, but this time around I was a little more stunned thinking about how the gigantic cannons that had been installed in the post-bellum reconstruction were somehow still muzzle-loaders. It’s like the pinnacle of an outdated technology, like steam-powered cars. What else stunned me then but still now is that Citadel cadets fired the first shots of the Civil War on Fort Sumter, and yet somehow that institution still exists. Here they are talking about it on a page titled, of all things “The War Between the States”! We should have buried the Citadel in the pages of history.

Anyways that’s my anti-bigotry bigotry for the day. You don’t get too terribly long on the fort due to ferry schedules, and eventually we loaded up back on the ferry and head on back to Charleston. At the snack bar on the ferry my super amazing wife got a Charleston Chew, which felt appropriate. Our next goal was to tie up some loose ends before investigating any other tourism we could do before heading to the airport. The first loose end was lunch, and we went to the Charleston Crab House specifically because they had She-crab soup on the menu, a Charlestonian delicacy I had somehow never tried. It was pretty good, I can confirm. This also put us in a good spot to finally pick up a sweetgrass basket for my super amazing wife right there at the market house. She got a shallow, medium-sized example set apart by its gorgeous twisted rim.

Basket in hand, we had to choose what to do with our few remaining hours in Charleston, and we decided to go to the Nathaniel Russel House. The goal here was to go on a house tour, and this fit the bill. It was really nice! You’ll accept my regrets again for not being able to delve too deeply into the history of slavery on the site, though the museum is indeed thinking through this and improving their exhibits. Currently archeology and restoration are going on in the portion of the house where the enslaved persons lived and worked, and it is yielding some interesting results.

*The staircase, from the bottom looking up (clearly).*

The rest of the house was really pretty as well. Its main claim to fame is the three-story floating spiral staircase, which is indeed impressive. The guided tour is also very forward about when discussing the life of the Russels, making sure you are aware that life was made possible via enslaved labor. He bought and sold enslaved people and it was enslaved people that did all the work. Not to be glib, but in addition to his experience in those horrors, Russel also had phenomenal taste in crown molding, chaise lounges, and other accoutrements. Or the curators do, anyway. There was only actually one chair that was original to the house, sitting in the office off the entryway. Outside the house the gardens are done up as well in a traditional style, and walking through them was a pleasant way to wrap up our time in Charleston. From here it was back to the airport and back to DC, but I suspect we’ll make it back again sometime in the next decade or so.

Charleston II: The Tea

My super amazing wife first learned about the Charleston Tea Garden when she was in China. China is a great place to learn about tea, but an inconvenient place to learn you hadn’t even needed to change continents to see it farmed. Visiting the Tea Garden was going to be the centerpiece of our whole trip to Charleston, and that being the case, we felt no need to rush into it. She had waited nearly a decade after all, so what was a few more hours? (what was going on here is we had bought tickets for a guided tour early in the afternoon and so had some time to kill)

To get properly fortified for a garden tour and properly in the southern mood, we opened up the day by having true Charlestonian food, namely a flight of fancy grits AND biscuits & gravy AND additional breakfast entrees to boot. We were not skimping on the food. Then, with that (barely) under our belts, we took advantage of the proximity and drove on over to the Charles Pickney Historic Site. The visitor center was closed for the winter, but visiting still justified a national park stamp, even if it had to be collected the next day.

The Charles Pickney site was very nice, as long as I’m dwelling on it. It is a very small site, really now just a large field nestled in between some housing developments built on the former plantation grounds. The house is still there but we only peered in through the windows. Instead we explored the short nature trail off into a little stretch of hammock forest they have on the edge of the site. Also near the house they have some camellias which were very pretty, and as you wandered from forest to flower to fields, all only dimly lit under a cloudy sky, the whole thing was very moody. This box was checked, and so soon we departed, but if we’re ever in Charleston again in the summer I’d like to try to go back. Given the dearth of remaining historical buildings or anything, it seems like from the site’s website that they’ve really tried to make up for that with a lot of deep research into the lives of the inhabitants of the plantation, enslaved and free, which we didn’t get to see.

*View from near the Sweetgrass Pavilion; I always like the cranes off in the distance, like hulking dinosaurs.*

From there, finally, we then proceeded over the peninsula of Charleston (making another attempt at basket shopping by stopping at the unfortunately-closed-at-that-time (though maybe they don’t even sell sweetgrass baskets?) but scenically-located Sweetgrass Pavilion in Mt. Pleasant) and deep into coastal forest all the way down Wadmalaw Island to finally make it to the Charleston Tea Garden. What a place! I mean nothing too crazy it is perhaps about what you would expect, i.e. sizeable fields cleared from forest and now populated with low bushes. But they have a very nice visitor center with an expansive gift shop. There is unlimited tea, both hot and cold and sweet and unsweet you can enjoy during your shopping experience. Through doors in the back you enter the video-guided tour of their processing facility, with the video restarting every 15 minutes or so. The plant was not processing at this moment (it was the tail end of winter, so no harvests had occurred lately), but the plant tracked with what I had seen at the last tea facility I visited.

*It used to be the Charleston Tea* Plantation, but the realized how gauche that was.

Soon the appointed time for our tour of the tea garden itself came around, and we all piled aboard the bus to take a cruise around the fields. The tour was good, and our guide focused on tea puns. The history of tea growing in South Carolina is fitful, with attempts starting as early as 1799. Congress subsidized another run at it in the 1880s, and tea plants were cultivated but eventually left to go feral. Even more decades later in 1963, cuttings from that now native cultivar were used to found the Tea Garden. Although the Garden is owned by Bigelow tea, all the tea grown on site and only the tea grown on site is sold under the Charleston Tea Garden brand.

Also during the tour they showed us the green house where they begin the new plants. My main takeaway is that getting a tea plant to successfully sprout is actually quite involved, so now I feel much better about my couple fitful attempts. Eventually we pulled back around to the star of the show, their custom tea harvester, which cruises down the fields and chops the tops of the bushes off and vacuums them up for later processing at the plant. Apparently they’ve finally bought a fancy new one from overseas as well, but that was locked up in the garage, too precious to stay in the weather. And yeah that was the Tea Garden! My super amazing wife had achieved a dream and was very satisfied. Back at the gift shop we loaded down on tea and accoutrements, and then piled into the car for our final major site of the day.

*The harvester! Really just a sort of lifted lawnmower.*

That site was Magnolia Plantation & Gardens. It was very late in the day by the time we arrived, so we didn’t have a whole lot of time to actually explore. Plus it was now raining fairly steadily. What this meant is for the second time at a plantation in one day I did not really have an opportunity to think too much about what it meant and how that history of slavery was presented and so I’m sorry to not address that. But with the fading afternoon light and rain, what the place was for us is crushingly aesthetic. We had the gardens nearly to ourselves, with their winding paths through cypress swamp dotted with the few sprouting camellias that they are especially known for.

*An alligator in the not-mentioned-in-the-text wildlife rescue area at Magnolia; this was not the suspicious one.*

As we walked around my super amazing wife spotted a wild alligator on the far shore of a little inlet, just chilling. We went up out of sight in an observation tower and came back down to find the alligator gone but then I spotted it in the water, much closer to us. A very suspicious thing for the alligator to do, if you ask me. We took pictures on bridges skirting live oak trees and reflected that the beautiful camellias we were looking at were so closely related to the tea plants we had just seen, and also how the moody Spanish moss dripping everywhere were apparently closely related to pineapples (according to our punny tea tour guide). Eventually though the rain started to really come down, herding us back to our car and then off to a BBQ dinner.

*Vast pools to reflect on your moodiness.*

Charleston I: Nostalgia

To take advantage of a three-day weekend and escape the cold (this was very early this year), my super amazing wife and I went on down to Charleston! Now, I lived in Charleston for two years for Nuclear Power School and Prototype, with a brief interlude up in Connecticut for Submarine Officer Basic Course (the Google AI search results describe SOBC as “intensive” and lemme tell ya intensive it is not). My super amazing wife wanted to go to Charleston to see a bit more of the South, and also to see the city where I had spent those formative years between the Naval Academy and reporting to the ship. I hadn’t been back to Charleston since I had driven out of there heading to Guam so I was excited to see what my old haunts had been up to.

And so after landing mid-morning and feeling comfort from the cold back home among the palm trees we went to go haunt said haunts. Although our focus for the weekend was going to be downtown and the coast, first thing we did was head the wrong direction up to North Chuck where we drove around my old neighborhood and then got lunch at the sandwich shop nearest to my heart, East Bay Deli. Back when I lived in Charleston I wouldn’t exactly save up to go to East Bay Deli, but I would only allow myself to eat there once a week, and on test days. I would savor that Rueben and rejoice in sweet tea. Luckily, EBD was exactly as I had left it; I sat in the same seat under the same posters to enjoy the same sandwich. Nostalgia and hunger satisfied, we then drove on downtown and spent the rest of the afternoon walking down and up it.

Charleston really is a charming city. When I was living there post-Annapolis, I thought of it mostly as a much bigger DTA (Downtown Annapolis). During our walk we started at the top end of downtown, and popped into what was then my favorite bookstore, Blue Bicycle Books. That was also as I had left it, unfortunately minus a bookstore cat I fondly remember. We also popped into my aspirational clothing store Ben Silver (mostly aspirational, my favorite pair of dress shoes is from there). I was very pleased when my super amazing wife dubbed it “beautiful.”

We continued to make our way toward the Battery, enjoying the architecture more and more as we went along. I really enjoy the Charleston single houses, with their outdoor door between the street and the porch. It just all seems so charming as you ignore the various historical markers explaining the beginning of the Confederacy. Finally reaching the Battery we admired the water as a small seaplane flew overhead. Absolutely no notes on Charleston’s location with a beautiful and protected harbor.

Having walked down King to get to the Battery, we started back up on East Bay Street, and thus I got to show my super amazing wife Rainbow Row. Back in nuke school I had gotten myself a painting of Rainbow Row from the sadly defunct art gallery in the Pink House, and then spent even more (surprisingly, to me at the time) to frame it. As such I rather like it but upon moving in together my super amazing wife’s aesthetic sense quickly decided the best place for it was prominently on display in the little-used guest bathroom located through a closet. We have not had a chance to redecorate since but my hope is that now that she has such a personal connection that maybe my Rainbow Row can wind up someplace less humid.

Anyways we continued to hit the highlights. We admired the Pineapple Fountain and how much it looked like a pineapple. Then we walked all the way through City Market on the lookout for a suitable sweetgrass basket. I have used one for years as a catchall and my super amazing wife wanted her very own. We weren’t too eager to buy one just then as the plan was to get one at the source on the sweetgrass basket highway, but during the weekend we never actually saw anyone in any of the stands despite driving through several times at different moments. I think it was always either the weather or everyone being at Church but we had to go ahead and get one finally in the Market on our last day.

At this point it wasn’t exactly getting late but it was getting later. The big plan was to go to Hyman’s to really round out my list of nostalgic locales (except for the place that never cut us off from bottomless mimosas one Tuesday morning after getting off the midwatch during Prototype). My fondest memory at Hyman’s is one of the servers getting wide-eyed and excited to explain the different traditional bases for shrimp & grits to my friend’s mom. This time around they only had shrimp & grits as an appetizer (reviewing the menu online maybe I just missed it under the entrees) but the crawfish I had as the main were good, though my super amazing wife stepped that up a notch with the shellfish delight. Plus too I ate soundly knowing I sat in the same spot noted Maggie Rogers fan Pharrell Williams had sat.

After a long day of verifying everything was just as I had remembered it, we drove off into the sunset (actually opposite the sunset) across the Ravenel bridge to check into our Mt. Pleasant hotel. We had to prepare to achieve a nearly decade-long dream of my super amazing wife’s the following day.

Manatee Parks

We are wrapping up our current little sunshine state series with everyone’s favorite Florida fauna, the manatee. In the midst of writing that sentence and trying to remember that “the sunshine state” was Florida’s nickname, I have found out that the legislature has gone to great lengths to gerrymander the state symbols and delineate as many animal constituencies as possible. So although manatees are Florida’s state marine mammal, on that same page you’ll note the dolphin still makes the list as the state saltwater mammal (which in my opinion does not address manatee migration habits), the alligator is titled the state reptile, leaving therefore room in turn for the panther to represent the entire Linnean kingdom as state animal and thus rounding out every animal that anyone is aware lives in Florida. I will note for the sake of my dairy cow-raising father-in-law that we get down to meat of things with the Cracker Cattle being the Florida state cattle, rounded up presumably by cowboys on the state horse, the Florida Cracker horse. Every state is stupid and ridiculous.

But back to why we’re here, manatees. The state is dotted with manatee viewing areas and over the course of our travels we visited two of them on different days. I am not educating any readers here but manatees, like any reasonable living creature, prefer warm water and will therefore concentrate on cold days where the water is warm, specifically the cooling outlets of power plants. The first of these we visited was Tampa Electric’s Manatee Viewing Center next to their Big Bend Power Station.

*Look at all those manatee backs at the Tampa Electric Manatee Viewing Center.*

I had first learned of this viewing area via Atlas Obscura, and I thought it would be kinda hokey. Like not really a destination, but some picnic tables where the locals were aware you could see manatees. We were very surprised therefore when we arrived and turned into the large parking lot dotted with solar panels leading the way to a massive visitor’s center. It is a whole destination. You could spend the afternoon. We only really touched on a part of it because it was so late in the day when we arrived, that we couldn’t possibly have gotten down to the big viewing tower or anything before the trails closed.

But we arrived and proceeded directly to the manatees. And there were tons! It will be an unfair comparison to our next manatee park, because on the day we visited the TECO MVC it had been cold (for Florida) for the few days prior in addition to being a bit nippy right then. So the manatees were huddled for our viewing pleasure right in the little discharge canal. They mostly floated there. It was a lot like watching hippos, in that most of what you see is small patches of the backs of manatees, though every once in a while you see a snort or them swimming around. Manatees fight less than hippos do though. Still, magical to see the majestic manatee in its natural(ish) habitat.

And the visitor center is very nice too. We didn’t poke around the exhibits much, but they had a café and a gift shop. The whole place is set up by the power company to make people feel better about living next to a coal-fired power plant (when I bought a lapel pin in the gift shop the credit card charge was to Tampa Electric), but it’s pretty effective. It seems a great place to take kids, and also very significantly they had an unbranded Mold-a-Rama, which I went gaga for. I love a Mold-a-Rama, and I am now the proud owner of a plastic manatee.

*I love plastic injection molding so much.*

Our next manatee viewing experience some time later was down at the Fort Myers Manatee Park! This again was a nice little way to spend some time in an afternoon. This park is downstream (as seems obvious in hindsight now that I’ve looked it up) of the Fort Myers Power Plant. This one, from my quick Googling, is natural gas- and fuel oil-fired. The biggest thing about this park for us is that it had been warmer when we visited, so there were not so many manatees. They were taking advantage of the nicer weather to go forage in less crowded pastures. But there were a few, and also some big fish and then also some kayakers, one of whom we got to watch capsize. I can’t tell if that was due to the fish, the manatees, or a personalized imbalance.

*Some shadows of Fort Myers manatees, if you can spot ’em.*

The rest of the park here too is a nature park with some short nature trails, and we got to check those out more thoroughly in this location because we had more time. It is always beautiful to be in nature. This location too had a gift shop (though without lapel pins that said something akin to “Fort Myers Manatee Park”) but which supported the local government instead of the local power company. There was no visitor center per se except a few signs about manatees. All in all a nice little local park, with the added bonus of seeing some manatees, and pondering the modern power infrastructure that makes the world work.

*I think the first two signs are redundant.*

Tampa Museum of Art

This post continues of course my current little disjointed Florida series, but it also continues a survey of Tampa-adjacent art museums – I have previously covered on this blog visiting both the Dalí Museum and the Imagine Museum. Both those museums are actually in St. Petersburg, but we won’t split hairs. On this day we were in fact in Tampa visiting the Tampa Museum of Art to give us something intellectual to do on a sunny Florida day in late November.

The most significant part of the experience of going to the Tampa Museum of Art was the fact that we (my super amazing wife and I) went with my mom. As a youth, I do not recall my family going to art museums a whole bunch. This is not my mom’s fault, it is the fault of kids having such a heavy choice in the selection of museums, by which I mean my brother always wanted to go to the Natural History Museum but if I had a say in the matter we would be going over to the Air & Space Museum. I think if dad got to pick we went over to the American History Museum, and mom’s influence was generally being in favor of any museum that would keep either the kids or dad from getting too rowdy. All of which to say that although it’s not like we haven’t taken mom to art museums before (see my first two links), it is always fun!

And the Tampa Museum of Art has quite an eclectic collection. Thinking back, the eclecticness is probably my major recollection. The museum’s website has that habit of particular museums that I am disappointed by, i.e. they have only a tiny portion of their collection viewable online, so it will be hard to show you some of this, as a heads up. The bulk of the museum is up on the second floor, and exiting the elevator we were deposited in a small section of I think recently acquired contemporary works. The first ones I took photos of were by Ya La’Ford and Paul Devoti. The piece my mom particularly liked, which I cannot find online because I did not take the right photos, was a large photographic artwork titled I think “Tod’s Liquors.” This was a I think you would call it a surrealist piece, a photo of the eponymous store but with out front a whole bunch of people designed to exude character. It would be seedy if it weren’t so sunny and my mom liked it a bunch. Maybe that says something about her psyche. This is a swerve for her because while that was up there in her favorites list, her actual favorite was a much less surprising pick by Emile Gruppe titled “Winter Stream.”

Winter Stream by Emile Gruppe, c. 1935-1945

I mean look at that thing, that is much more a mom piece of art. This piece was in the second part of the museum we wandered through in our rectangular journey (the museum is mostly on the one floor, and you go around the perimeter), a long gallery of various impressionists and closely related artists. I feel like I am about to say I didn’t know the earth went around the sun here, but I’m not sure I was aware there were particularly any American impressionists. But there were and they were pretty good. As you walked down the gallery the impressionism came into focus with a number of artworks more in the Hudson School vein. The bits I liked the most though were the most Florida bits, which were paintings of the swamp. There were some really great ones! I feel like capturing say a sunset over a river valley nestled amongst mountains is a difficult skill but a widespread one as you got all these American artists roving the West learning from each other on how to paint that, but how many artists were honing the ability to evoke the particular choking depth of a cypress grove? It seems to me it takes a real light brush for that stuff but some of the artists on display had mastered it.

Untitled (Marshland with Palm) *by Alfred Hair, c. 1958*

Like all conscientious American art museums are doing these days, the museum was also taking a focus on art by Black artists. “Untitled (Marshland with Palm)” above is by Highwayman Alfred Hair, but also they had a small if stunning display of Vodou flags by Haitian artist Myrlande Constant. These were really remarkable. We have a Haitian friend whose house is filled with beautiful art, but these flags were an artform we were entirely unfamiliar with. They are so intricate, using beadwork to form scenes inspired by religious stories.

Ogou Ferrialle by Myrlande Constant, 2004

But I mentioned eclecticness. After all that Very American stuff, then the museum has the real pride of its collection, a whole bunch of mostly Etruscan artifacts. You really gotta change up your perspective as you go from one gallery to the next. Mom wasn’t too interested. The focus on the antiquities comes from an early donor, one Joseph Veach Noble. There is apparently exactly one photo of this guy, and it is fierce. But what to say about these artifacts? They were neat. The Etruscans are mysterious enough that every little glimpse into their lives is a portal into a strange and unknown world. Like a little model of a liver used for divination, that is something I would never do, use a liver to divine the future. And then of course there is also the mundane but beautiful, like a 2300-year-old fish plate with bright colors and fetching wave pattern on the side and a very useful built-in central indentation probably used for holding fish sauce. I would use that today and as always it is so amazing to see the same brushwork that they would have seen as they sat down to an evening meal.

*Liver Model for Divination, ca. 150-50 BCE*

And so yeah that was the museum. A nice place with a lot of cool art and changing exhibitions. It is strongest when focusing on art centered on Florida itself, reaching into the swampy mists to discover a side of the United States not typically part of the American canon. But artifacts are cool too!

Mote SEA

Fresh from our Danube adventure, the next few of posts will comprise something of a Florida series, amalgamating a couple different trips. During one summer when I stayed with my grandparents down in Florida, I read off of their shelf A Land Remembered by Patrick D. Smith. It remains the source of most of my impressions of the origins of Florida, and to this day I expect there to be a lot more cattle around then I typically wind up seeing when I’m down there. All of which is to say don’t worry, these posts won’t be nearly so long and will also involve a lot more marine life.

On one of our trips on down to Florida we were especially excited to visit Mote SEA. Longtime readers of the blog will recall that my super amazing wife and I (only my super amazing girlfriend at the time of writing the post I’m about to link, oh how times change) are big fans of Mote. I have many fond memories of going as a Youth, and my super amazing wife loves both sharks and Eugenie Clark.

Mote SEA is their new aquarium as of October 2025. We had initially tried to go in November 2025 only to find out all the tickets had sold out well in advance. It is very popular! We finally did manage to go on a subsequent trip a couple months later, but only because this time we had bought our tickets well in advance; it had again sold out the day we visited.

Whereas the previous aquarium, Mote Marine, had been jutting out into Sarasota Bay, perched on one end of Lido Key, the new Mote SEA is well inland (if you don’t count the retention ponds) and behind a mall. Frankly I’m about to come down a bit harshly on the aquarium. And for that I’m sorry. I understand entirely the purpose of the new location. Mote SEA stands for Science Education Aquarium, and the place I think is designed around school field trips to get kids interested in science and marine life and conservation. Which is a very, very noble goal that I support wholeheartedly, but having visited Mote Marine so many times, it just lacks the same charm. At Mote Marine you felt more like you were visiting what it was, which was a marine animal rescue center with an aquarium tacked on. At Mote SEA it seems so much more like just an aquarium. And they didn’t even bring over Molly the Mollusk, though again apparently for good reason, that being she is just too fragile to move. I read online that they are going to re-open Mote Marine to the public in some capacity, but maybe that is just an optimistic rumor.

But enough of that, let’s talk about the good bits. The place is very nicely done! You enter and, if you were hungry like we were, you can duck directly into the café they have on-site. My super amazing wife had a fish sandwich, which I will never tire of pointing out is a bit morbid in an aquarium. Then you take a three-story escalator right to the tippy-top to start looking around. The aquarium of course retains its focus on the sealife of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Up on the top floor in an outside area they have both manatees and the ever-cute otters, so they were both as always entertaining to watch.

As you wander down you get to more fishy-fish, with many tanks of fish. And also penguins! Penguins don’t feature much in Florida generally, but here we happened across a feeding so we got to watch them slurp up some fish. I also liked to watch roundabout here the jellyfish setup they had, which seemed to me to be basically a fish washing machine. I liked to think they had gotten a little bit dirty and needed a freshening up.

*You have to make sure to regularly wash your jellyfish.*

And then of course there was the absolute best bit of the aquarium, which was the shark tank. It is a big tank and if you are descending from the top of the aquarium you first encounter it from above, looking down through the surface at all of the sharks. This is cool and they have going along with it an exhibit on Eugenie Clark, which is great. But then eventually all the way down you get to the tunnel underneath the shark tank, and if the shark tank is the best part of the aquarium, the tunnel is the best part of the shark tank and worth the visit. You get to see the sharks gliding around above and beside you and that alone is worth the visit to the aquarium. Just hang out there for a while watching all the sharks and rays glide past, it is great.

Having gone through the whole aquarium, we realized it hadn’t actually taken that much time, so we went on through again, this time appreciating the tops of the sharks even more now that we had seen the bottom, and getting to see the manatees in a different spot of their tank and munching on different pieces of cabbage. Eventually we exited through the gift shop where we both had been tempted by many things but ultimately resisted. All in all if you’re around you should check out Mote SEA. Now that Mote Marine is closed it has the advantage of being no longer knowable and therefore perfect in my memory, but Mote SEA is very good at what it is trying to do, which is show you that Eugenie Clark was cool because she liked sharks.

Eurotrip: Munich Addendum

*View from the Marienplatz, including the glockenspiel.*

Reading this week:

The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi

The title of my last post was “It ends in Regensburg,” which referred to the cruise but not this series of Eurotrip posts, don’t you worry! The thing about Regensburg is that it doesn’t have an international airport, so getting home again was going to require getting to Munich first. To accomplish that, we left the ship pretty early on our final day of the cruise. It’s exactly like a hotel, in that they want you off sometime in the morning so they can prep the cabins for the next round of guests. We had a lovely breakfast and the ship had arranged taxis for us to the airport. My super amazing wife and I head out alongside most of the rest of my family, with our immediate destination as the train station. And from there we caught a train and were on our way!

A brief pause to evaluate whether I would go on a Viking cruise again. I think most definitely someday. My parents paid for this trip as part of the 40^th wedding anniversary, but a quick look at their website reveals this same trip costs about $2700 per person (plus airfare). That does seem worth it. The customer service on the cruise was top notch, with staff remembering your name and preferences and working hard to make sure you have a pleasant time. The food is good and the tours they arrange are indeed pretty interesting and well-run. A Viking cruise suffers only in the same way any cruise does, in that the time is a bit whirlwind, but it was a lot of fun. However, I don’t think we’re going to sign up for another one soon. They do seem to cater to a slightly older crowd who is willing to give themselves over to the steady hand of Viking; mom had wanted to go on a cruise instead of just a generic European vacation specifically so she didn’t have to do any of the planning. My super amazing wife and I are still young and foolish enough to plan overly elaborate vacations on our own, but I could easily see at some point becoming a Viking aficionado. Those world cruises don’t seem like too bad of a deal, really.

But in the meantime and until I save up for that, we were off to Munich. We arrived fairly smoothly at one of the Munich airport hotels, dropped off our stuff, and head on into the city. To get there we took the S-Bahn, which also went smoothly but took a little bit longer than expected. All our trains this day were a bit delayed, which goes very much against stereotypes. Emerging from the train we walked around the Marienplatz admiring everything. On our way back we happened upon a performance of the Rathaus-Glockenspiel which was fortunate timing. Off the Marienplatz we poked a little ways into the Viktualienmarkt (open-air market) and checked out a shop or two, and then got a Munich-appropriate Taiwanese lunch.

This all brought us to our major destination in the city: the Museum Fünf Kontinente! This is an ethnographic museum, and I found it because I was searching for Africa museums in Germany. The website is unassuming, so I didn’t know what to expect, but upon arrival the building is very assuming. It is yet another undeservedly under-trafficked museum. It had a lot of cool stuff.

*Early 14th century Iranian tile fragment.*

Upon arrival we got the “combo” ticket so we could also see the special exhibits. Before getting to those we started off at the Islamic art which was, per usual, gorgeous. Many if not most things had English labels in addition to the German, which was convenient for us. From Islamic art we then went into the exhibit on Oceania which was likewise filled with gorgeous and mesmerizing pieces. One thing I wish I understood better about all the collections was the how or why of it. I suppose it is an ethnographic museum so they filled it with ethnographic stuff, but like, there are some Benin bronzes in there with little reflection of how they were there.

One section did have an explanation, which was an exhibit on Myanmar. It came with a disclaimer that it was curated in 2014 when the prospects for Myanmar are different than they are now. The items in the exhibit came largely from a collecting trip circle 1910 when the museum sent a dude out there to buy a bunch of stuff, which is a dream job if there ever was one. This was followed by an exhibit on Japan celebrating 160 years of German-Japanese relations featuring art by a guy that was on the Perry expedition. The art was apparently from his second, non-Perry visit, whatever that means for its perspective.

I of course liked the sub-Saharan Africa stuff the best. One of the special exhibits we had gotten the combo ticket for was “Merci Maman” all about the Malian art of painting on busses. It included some interesting thoughts on the culture, like the bus boys (conductors) being the “heroes” of the operation, which is not how I experienced it in Zambia. They made some hay of how artists will put both Putin and an American flag on a bus without seeing a contradiction. Based on her experience however my super amazing wife didn’t see a contradiction at all, she figured people just know both groups give the country money.

*Veranda post carved by Olowe of Ise, early 20th century.*

In the non-special-exhibit bit of Africa, one thing they did was mix in contemporary art with the more ancient stuff, which is an interesting comment on both. Some pieces from the DRC included masks and costumes made of Kinshasa trash which is an interesting take. Another claim to fame for the Museum Fünf Kontinente for American visitors is that it houses one of the Yoruba veranda posts carved by Olowe of Ise that inspired the design of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

At this point after a long day we were beginning to lose steam so we kinda zoomed through the North America section. It was interesting to see North America through a German lens. They kinda mashed a lot of stuff together, or more accurately stuff from a particular culture would be spread throughout, despite a sign explaining that “Indians are not all the same!” The final room we perused was full of Peruvian artifacts, including a few textiles that were 2000 years old, which always blows my mind. It really brings you so close to the past.

Stand depicting flowers and birds, likely a border to a larger woven piece. Typical of grave goods in the Nazca region, and came to the museum from an excavation by Heinrich Ubbelohde-Doering. Camelid hair, dyed, 150BC-100AD. Let’s hope Heinrich was a good guy.

Full of the treasure of five continents we made our way back to the hotel via the scenic route through some more shops. And then after a night at the hotel it was off to the airport proper to catch our flight and head on back home, our Eurotrip at its final final end.

Eurotrip: It ends in Regensburg

*The famous Stone Bridge of Regensburg.*

Our Danube River cruise ended in Regensburg. Having seen the river at this point I am surprised that it isn’t the end of the line for everyone. I can’t dig up the quote but I remember reading Mark Twain’s thoughts on what they call rivers out in the western United States; having seen the Mississippi river, it was strange to him that people would refer to tiny little creeks that even disappeared sometimes in the summer as rivers. The Danube isn’t quite that tiny but still, doesn’t seem like there is a lot of room to work with on that thing.

*The Roman remnants of Regensburg, and some bins.*

We spent the first part of the morning on the ship-arranged tour of Regensburg. Our German tour guide this day was less no-nonsense than Daniel but was very nice. She showed us the Roman bits of Regensburg along with several patrician towers, the fanciest way to flex on your neighbors in the 13^th century. There was also the Stone Bridge, Regensburg’s medieval wonder. It is a nice bridge though when I was talking about river navigation in the second paragraph this was more specifically what I was talking about.

*The longest-running restaurant of all time right there.*

We popped over the bridge to admire some of the sights but the real excitement was on the southern side anyway. There was the salt shed that was the heart of Regensburg’s medieval economy and which has a very neat little visitor center inside. There is also more importantly the thing I was most excited for in Regensburg, the Historische Wurstkuchl, i.e. what is probably the oldest continually operating restaurant in the world. They have been slinging meals for 900 years (sausages for only about 200 but boiled meat before that). We got lunch there, with the sausage and sauerkraut raising spirits slightly dampened by the rain.

*The* Ruthof permanently moored on the side of the Danube and home of the Donau Schiffahrtsmuseum.

Tell you what though, the REAL gem of Regensburg is the variously named Donau Schiffahrtsmuseum, or Danube Shipping Museum. This thing was so great. It is not hard to find, it is right on the river there downtown, but it did not seem to be very well-visited. My super amazing wife and I were the only ones onboard when we visited in the middle of the day. The museum actually comprises of several ships, but the flagship is the paddle steamer Ruthof, so you walk across the brow and pay your entrance fee there. That’s all where the very tiny little gift shop was, which delightfully carried lapel pins! (of the stick pin variety)

The ship was so great. It acted as a towboat on the Danube, and so would pull along barges transporting goods. I’m pulling these details from the above-linked website, but it was originally built intra-war, struck a mine during WWII (who knew the Danube was mined), and sat on the bottom for 12 years before being raised and then was in service all the way until 1973. Which is amazing when you consider its heart is a horizontal, double-boiler, double (?) expansion steam engine packing, apparently 800 hp, and again driving paddle wheels. The ship is pretty big too, and must have been a behemoth to navigate on the river with a two of barges behind.

*View of the front end of the engine. Look how well maintained it is.*

But it is not a ship museum but a shipping museum, so the first part has tons of dioramas and ship models and other information about Danube shipping. They have models of shipyard and of the salt fleet we learned about in Passau, and even more fun stuff like schiffmühles or ship mills, a moveable river-powered mill. The museum documents a whole river-bound history and culture I don’t think you’d ever think about if you didn’t look into it on purpose, what with the modern world rending a lot of these things obsolete.

*Looking forward from the starboard bridgewing and heading to the salt shed.*

After the navigation museum the rest of the afternoon wound down with some wandering around Regensburg. I admired the Kepler house from the outside and looked at some more Roman walls and the like and there was some final bit of souvenir shopping to do. Our final dinner on the Viking ship Tor was a nice time to say goodbye to the crewmembers that had treated us so well during our visit, and finally we returned to our rooms to rest for the next day when we would finally strike out on our own once again.

*Part of Regensburg’s Roman walls, now residing in the basement of a parking garage.*

Eurotrip: Passau Ober All

With only a couple days left in the cruise, we awoke this morning having sailed into Passau and therefore our final country of Germany. And it was very quickly evident we were in Germany as we started the walking tour of Passau. Because we had moored outboard of another ship, the tour had to be bumped 15 minutes earlier, representing something of a nightmare scenario for our local tour guide Daniel. Daniel was very German and opened with a small lecture about how, as a German, he believes in being punctual, and that means not late and not early.

I loved Daniel so much, he was great. Unlike our other guides, he didn’t really have patter and didn’t talk while walking. This caused some of the people on our tour to think they had audio problems with their headsets. Daniel did do some funny stuff despite being no nonsense – he is normally a high school teacher, you see. One lady asked him what he meant by “virology” (she had misheard) and he simply said “I did not say that. I do not know that word.” Later my dad told Daniel he (dad) had looked it up and it meant the study of viruses, to which Daniel said flatly “I know.”

We learned a few things on the tour. At St. Stephen’s cathedral, Daniel told us the bulb-shaped domes atop the towers were indicative of the baroque style, so anything with bulbs was built 1600s or later. That’s a handy tip for you architecture-spotters out there. The cathedral had been rebuilt after a fire in the 1600s, and tell you what man there seems to have been a number of fires around that time that favored baroque architects (the same thing had happened at Gottweig Abbey, you see). The cathedral is in the midst of being restored, and so had just been cleaned while we were there, and it was very bright and beautiful. St Stephen’s claim to fame is that their pipe organ is the largest in Europe with something like 18,000 pipes. While we were there it was being restored, so it didn’t have all of its pipes this day. But tell you what, even with 80% or whatever of the pipes missing, it is still a rather large pipe organ. Also interesting is that in the church St. Stephen’s relics have been there since the 1400s or so, Daniel told us.

*When it takes a crane to clean your pipes.*

We then did some more wandering around town, learning things like Passau didn’t get bombed during the war because the Allies didn’t think it was important enough, and admiring the confluence of rivers. Passau is where it is because it is the meeting point of the rivers Inn (meaning “Wild,” according to Daniel), Ilz, and Danube, and it is pretty to see them come together. In our remaining time until lunch my super amazing wife and I wandered Passau, admiring cuckoo clocks and old books and buying Christmas decorations.

*The Inn River, shortly before it joins the Danube.*

After lunch the plan was to go to the Oberhausmuseum. This required some commitment because the ship was actually sailing shortly after lunch but there would be busses you could take to catch up (though if you missed the bus you were stuck in Passau). Plus it had started raining. But we girded ourselves and went and I am very glad we did, the Oberhausmuseum was great!

My records have this down as “Passaw” by Leonhard Abent, copper engraving, 1576. *The Oberhaus is on the hill above the city.* The caption also read “The view of Passau is characteristic of the situation of the residential city in the late 16^th century. The Prince-Bishop (coat of arms) and the citizens determined the fate of the trading city.” But it appears Wikimedia has it recorded differently.

To get there we took a bus up (it’s called the Oberhaus because it’s up on a hill you see) and started touring the castle. It is very big and has a lot of cool exhibits on various aspects of the history of Passau all the way back to Roman times and before. One thing I really liked is that they had a whole bunch of pictures of the castle through the ages because now we were there also in this long long history of the town. I also started noticing boats in the pictures, which soon enough led to the highlight of the Oberhausmuseum, a whole series of displays on the salt trade!

*A salt barge with a load of kufe salt barrels.*

It seems that Passau got wealthy off of salt initially. I think I am messing up some of this history, but my understanding is that salt was mined for centuries and centuries upriver on the Inn. It could then be easily floated down to Passau, but to get it up to Regensburg (farther upriver on the Danube, our next destination) was quite the operation, and this is what the exhibit was about. The Oberhaus itself protected Passau and this salt transshipment monopoly. Since you couldn’t really paddle upriver on the Danube against the current, there were these whole long caravans of salt transport boats, pulled along by teams of up to 50 horses. The salt itself was packed into special small barrels called kufe. I loved reading about ancient systems of trade, it was so good and such a pleasant surprise in the museum.

*Walking down from the Oberhaus in the rain.*

Other great bits about the museum included the views, which overlooked the city of Passau and the confluence of the rivers. Like I said it had started raining, so the town and upriver valleys had a mist-shrouded look to them. Even the bathroom window had a gorgeous overlook. There was also an exhibit on the different craft guilds in the city. One of the most interesting things there is that the guild that made candles and the guild that made gingerbread were in fact the same guild because both candles and gingerbread use the products of bees (wax and honey). But we were rather worn out from a long day of walking around at this point, so we decided to make our way down the hill through the rain, which was very moody and scenic but meant we were soaked through by the time we arrived at the bus rendezvous. We warmed up for a while in a restaurant with a beer and a cheese plate before getting transported back to the ship.

Overall Passau was a surprisingly interesting and beautiful place to visit. We learned a lot about the salt trade and regional dynamics and what it takes to maintain Europe’s largest pipe organ. The evening ended with us sailing up the Danube one last time, my super amazing wife and I leaning out of our French balcony just admiring the peaceful, passing riverbank in the dark.

*Passau from the Oberhaus, the Inn on the left and the Danube on the right.*

Eurotrip: Wachau Cruisin’

*Notice only one of the clocks is real.*

This day was potentially the highlight of the whole river cruise. It was, you see, the day with the most river cruisin’. We woke up cruising and went to sleep cruising. But in the middle there we did go to the extremely lovely Gottweig Abbey.

To get to the Abbey the ship pulled over at Krems and we hopped on some busses. The drive was only a couple of miles but very scenic, over the Danube and then up to the Abbey on the top of the hill. It’s a great spot for an Abbey, it overlooks the surrounding towns and forest valleys. The Abbey is a bit of a throwback, I am to understand, in that they own like 1300 hectares or thereabouts and lease it out to the locals while the monks also attend the parishes. I guess you can be a monk without being a priest but I haven’t looked into it.

Upon arrival at the Abbey we watched a short video about the Abbey’s history while sipping on a welcome glass of sparkling wine. We then met up with our tour guide, who looked and resembled nothing so much as a young but slightly (only slightly) less buff Arnold Schwarzenegger. I can only assume all Austrians are like this and we got a standard one. He was acting as a tour guide while finishing up his degree, I think in hospitality. The Abbey was a very pretty place to walk around, and as we walked I noticed that the church had a painted-on clock along with some fake, painted-on windows (see top photo). These were meant to be temporary cost-savings measures. The Abbey itself isn’t actually even “finished,” with the latest renovation in the 18^th century having envisioned much more square footage. The second clock and painted-on windows were thus only meant to be there long enough until they could install a real clock and keep building the wing, but that never happened. And now the Abbey has a protected status which means they couldn’t install a real clock if they wanted to.

The Abbey’s other claim to fame is the largest Baroque staircase in Austria, topped by a big ole’ mural with Charles VI in the middle. That was nice, we spent some time admiring it. We also spent some time admiring the church. This was also impressive, but less pretty than Mattias church in Budapest I thought. However, what they do have is a skull. More specifically, the head of their founder St. Altmann is in a “precious Baroque shrine” down in the chapel where the monks do their prayers multiple times a day. Metal. The relics in Vienna were top notch with Jesus’ loincloth, but come on. You can see this relic from a bit of a distance, which our young Schwarzenegger was telling us. My dear sweet mother, though, is a bit hard of hearing, and couldn’t understand, and so was asking me what he was saying. So soon enough I was yelling in my mom’s ear about a dead guy in a box right there in the middle of a very peaceful church.

Following the tour we then went off to a dumpling demonstration which we had paid extra for. Besides heads in boxes, the other thing that Gottweig is famous for are their apricots. They like to do a lot with apricots; after this demonstration we also had a tasting of apricot wine which was great. But the dumpling demonstration was all about their special apricot dumpling recipe. I have it somewhere, though this appears to be it online. It’s an old-school boiled dessert and also very delicious with a whole apricot right in the middle. Since going to the demonstration I have just been waiting for apricot season to roll around so I can try making it myself again. Having been both wined and dined at the Abbey, we exited via the gift shop (they have some wonderful stuff) and it was back to the busses and ship for our afternoon of cruising.

And what an afternoon it was! It was us heading on up the Wachau Valley while Paul, our tour director, gave commentary. We enjoyed the tour up on the sun deck in the shade. The valley really is beautiful and cruising through while admiring a book is very nice. Just to run through the highlights, we saw the rabbits of St. Michael’s running along the roof, the Hill of 1000 Buckets (buckets of wine that is, referring to the Hill’s production capacity) apparently dubbed that by Charlemagne, the Ruine Hinterhaus, Willendorf (of Venus fame, so that was an enthralling brush with celebrity), and the Burgruine Aggstein. We were also on the lookout for nude sunbathers, which Paul sternly warned us were a hazard of navigation in these parts, but I’m not sure we saw any. Even without that though, it was simply a great afternoon on a boat in a river admiring the sights, the sort of thing you figure all of a Viking cruise is going to be until they occasionally kick you off to look at a castle.

Right around the time any sunbathers would have been packing up, we eventually head down ourselves for a strudel demonstration hosted by the ship’s pastry chef. This was very entertaining and as an added bonus of course we got to try strudel at the end. There was also tea, and once that was over the lounge cleared out and we spent the rest of the afternoon there lounging of course with our books. This is how every day should go.

Pat in the World

Paperwork enthusiast seeking new frontiers of paperwork. Former submariner, former Peace Corps Volunteer. Opinions, thoughts, and comments reflect no actual persons, living or in the Navy.

Category: Travel