Storming

We woke up on our third day to cloudy skies and predictions of a massive storm. Seemed like a good day to head up to Charleston.

One of the downsides to camping at Edisto is that there’s no fresh water. The water table is too shallow, the sea gets in. There’s potable salt water, which works fine for showers and dishes, but if you want drinking water you have to lug your jugs down to the fire station, which apparently has the only deep well around this part of the island.

The only real problem this causes it that there’s no laundry at the campground. And if you have three kids in the sand and mud all day, you need laundry access pretty regularly. The nearest proper laundromat is in Charleston, and since we wanted to see the city anyway, especially Corrinne, who lived in Charleston for five years, we headed up to do laundry and walk around downtown a bit before the storm hit.

We managed to find a shopping center that had a laundromat, a hardware store, a pharmacy and a Thai restaurant, all our errands in one place, plus lunch. Then we headed downtown, took the kids over to see the rainbow houses and the battery park.

Then we got some ice cream and walked over to the Circular Church, which seemed unchanged since our last visit.

We made it back to camp before the storm hit, but just barely. I gambled and threw some burgers on the grill and about two minutes later I lost, the deluge started. I had to race out and salvage what I could of the now soggy raw meat. We finished dinner on the stove and ate to the deafening downpour pounding on the fiberglass of the bus. There were predictions of golf ball size hail, but fortunately all we got was rain. And more rain.

The rain didn’t stop, nor did the more or less continuous thunder and lightning, for about 10 hours. It was a hell of a storm. Or so I’m told. I fell asleep amid the flashes and booms around 10. Corrinne was awake most of the night.

Surprising even me, the bus hardly leaked at all. A little water came in through a window track that was simply overwhelmed by the sheets of rain coming down, but even the leaks I know about didn’t seem to leak that night. Odd, but I’ll take it. My last thought before falling asleep was man, it would really suck to be in a tent right now.