Saturday, March 8, 2008

Tuesday in Charleston

Phil and I just relaxed on Monday, but on Tuesday we hit the town. Charleston can be very confusing. Our first stop was going to be an outlet mall in Charleston, the Tanger Outlet Center. Well, it was a great idea, right? And it was kind of necessary. I had packed all of my high heels, but I had forgotten my tennis shoes. Go figure...
So Phil and I just knew we could run by the outlet mall, pick up some shoes (and maybe some other things), then get down to some serious sight-seeing. But, did it happen that way? Of course not.
After driving around all of creation and beyond, we finally stopped by the Charleston's visitors center. The very nice people there gave us a map of downtown (which turned out to be really useful on Wednesday but didn't help us at all on Tuesday) and pointed out the "more important" sites to see while we were there. But, that didn't help us find the outlet mall. We figured, hey, it'll be on the nice map they gave us. Well, it wasn't.
So, guess what we did. Yep, that's right. We drove all around creation and beyond AGAIN! Then we got really desperate and called The Mom and asked her to look up the outlet mall online to get us some more directions. But, of course, The Mom wasn't even at home. No help there at all.
So, what did we do? We finally gave up. We found the interstate, dug out our directions back to Isle of Palms, and we were going to forget about it. We tried our darnedest to figure out how we could be so turned around and so off course, but it just didn't make sense. The directions were clear. We'd even written them down. How could we not find this place?
Well, after all excuses and explanations had been thought of and rehashed and we both fell silent, I looked up to see a beautiful site beside the interstate. Would you believe it? There on the side of the road was a billboard for none other than Tanger Outlet Center.
We knew we'd been close, but we were so much closer than we had thought. Two exits later, we're pulling into the parking lot. (Just for the record, the directions we had were no where close to where the outlet mall actually was. So, it wasn't really our fault we couldn't find it.)
We were both so proud of ourselves, we both got several things, including a matching pair of Reebok tennis shoes (which, believe it or not we picked out independently; it was a little scary), a free pair of heels for me (buy 2 pair of shoes, get a 3rd free deal), some Bath & Body Works stuff (for me), a cute tennis skirt/short thing from Izod (for me), a beautiful mortar & pestle (definitely for me), some shorts from Old Navy (again, for me), and a really durable sunglass case (for Phil).
We had a lot of fun, and, except for the shoes and Old Navy shorts, we didn't spend more than $10 in any store. Didn't we do good? :)

1 comment:

anniegrin said...

Neither of you actually "fell silent"! It was just the drone of the highway blocking out your voices for a small period of time. You could have stopped at a gas station for directions.... oh, wait gas stations aren't allowed to speak english anymore...!!!