Happy New Year! Yes, it’s been a while and probably would’ve been even longer but I finally mustered up the courage to tackle this post. This blog is created through WordPress and they recently changed their editing system to something totally unfamiliar to me. Finally, today my resistance was low and after a quick YouTube tutorial I felt confident enough to dive in and get it done. It seems as if the new editor is actually much more user friendly particularly to idiots like me who know nothing about ‘code’ and has her eyes glaze over when I hear things like ‘CSS’.
Why are some of us so resistent to change? Change was a good thing for us this Christmas when we decided to hold our annual Christmas get together with my sister and brother-in-law in a mild climate. Charleston, SC was this year’s destination celebration and it did not disappoint.
The temperature was in the high 60s-70s while we were there and although it was mostly cloudy the sun did shine one of the days. This was the day we did our scavenger hunt.
The past several years I have become more enamoured of experiential gifts. So this year I bought 5 tickets for a self guided scavenger hunt through Charleston for all of us. I used a site called Let’s Roam to buy the tickets. This will direct you to an app for your phone that you link your tickets to and select the site for your hunt. Typically, there are a few options for each city and you can also add a ‘theme’ like a birthday celebration and then each person selects a character that they will assume during the hunt. They have options for kids, trivia-minded folks, photography lovers and even an ‘observer’ for the one who really doesn’t want to do much. As you negotiate your way to the various big stops each character is given specific individual challenges and the group also gets big challenges. You submit your accumulated information either through photos or via multiple choice selections. The idea is to get as many points as possible.
If you are extremely competitive you must do all challenges. (My sister and I are the worst. I am barking out orders like a German Panzer driver and my sister the director is staging photos with Fellini-esque style.) There was a slight learning curve involved as some our our group (ahem, Darren & Damian) would race to the stop and begin before the rest of us had caught up. There is a time component for when you open the information related to the stop so a few times early in the hunt we lost points because the group wasn’t together to answer. This abruptly ceased after I threw a tantrum and belittled them.
Missing: Our photographer, Dawn
On some of the challenges you may have to recruit the help of unsuspecting people in your immediate vicinity as Dawn & I did when we needed an item of ‘food’. There was a girl eating a donut on the steps of one of the buildings in our stop. Fortunately, we are not shy and quickly explained what we were doing and asked if we could photograph her donut. She was more than happy to comply and we racked up some points.
Another nice feature is that you can pause your hunt. This came in handy when my sister started to get ‘hangry’ in the early afternoon. We were able to make a lunch stop and then resume. It says it covers about 2 miles and a couple of hours but because of our need to succeed we walked at least 10 miles, covered many areas of Charleston we had never seen before on foot and spent the better part of the day engaged in this extremely fun activity. If you have any interest, here’s a link: https://www.letsroam.com/
We would divert when we came across something we wished to explore further like the old historic Market area, the waterfront, Rainbow Row or the gorgeous homes and holiday displays.
We even got in a little shopping as we would duck in and out of various shops and boutiques. When we completed our hunt we had a sense of accomplishment as our score indicated we did better than 94% of the other teams who’ve attempted this hunt. Of course I pointed out that we would’ve scored higher if we hadn’t made those foolish early mistakes!
Lest you should think that our night life was lacking in Charleston I can assure you that it was stellar. Dawn & Darren always pick some of the best restaurants and even though Charleston is a tough town in which to acquire reservations on relatively short notice they were able to succeed. Several weeks before we are scheduled to arrive somewhere they send me links to restaurants they are considering for our repasts. We settled on Blossom for our first night and the food was excellent! They also surprised us when they too opted for an experiential gift and took us to Peninsula Grill for dinner on our second evening. They even bought Damian a nice shirt as one of his Christmas presents because they assume we are morons who have never dined with them before and are unfamiliar with the caliber of dining establishments they frequent. (For the record, I had packed the kid not 1 but 2 nice shirts.)
Peninsula Grill’s famous coconut cake is spectacular! 
The night markets
Considering we spent our previous Christmas gathering in Annapolis and the temperatures were in the single digits I think we all agree we much preferred the more mild climate of Charleston. Don has expressed vociferous protests to our proposal of visiting Quebec as next year’s destination pleading instead for a Puerto Rican Christmas. We’ll have to see.
Basking in the sun? 
Or freezing our asses off?
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