Nov 9-10  The weather has been rainy, sometimes torrential in the last week.  We did visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, enjoying the last of the fall colour in this area, but it was a drizzly day.  It has also been below freezing some of the nights in these parts of Tennessee.

Nov 11 The weather cooperates and we have a beautiful sunny day.  We are celebrating Guy’s 60th birthday a few weeks early at Tanktown USA in the Appalachian mountains near Morganton, Georgia.  Guy enjoys a great afternoon of driving a tank through lots of mud and water.  We select an old police cruiser for spray painting and breaking the windows with a sledgehammer.  Then it is time to crush it with the tank!  A super fun day and a great memory.

Nov 12-14  We drive out of the cold mountains down to sea level to visit Charleston, South Carolina.  This is a beautiful historic city with lots of antebellum houses, historic churches, and cobblestone roads.

 We also visit the Boone Hall Plantation, the oldest working and living plantation in The USA.  The driveway down to the mansion is breath-taking with 200-year old oak trees on each side forming a canopy dripping with Spanish moss and lush ferns growing along the boughs.  This Avenue of the Oaks and the grounds have been featured in many movies and television shows.  The plantation has produced indigo (for dye), cotton, bricks, pecans and other crops for 3 centuries.  The mansion is 10,000 square feet and the plantation was once 4100 acres.  Up to 300 slaves lived and labored on this plantation in the days of slavery.