more car trouble, Charleston, CRBR

Cooper River Bridge Run

As I wrote the last entry I was sitting on a couch, in the Thompson's apartment, in downtown Charleston, waiting for a tow truck to arrive from Columbia to pick up our car and take it back to the transmission place that we had picked it up from the day before. We were gone from Tuesday-Sunday. Our car was in the repair shop from Tuesday-Thursday and again from Friday-Sunday. It was a bit of an inconvenience, but certainly could have been much worse. Yesterday, Anna drove us to Columbia to pick up our car. After about 1.5 hours on the interstate (headed to Winston) the over drive light started blinking and I thought we were going to be on the side of the interstate...again. The car made it 3 more miles to the next exit where we pulled into a gas station. While there, my dad called and informed us that he had talked to someone at a Mazda dealership who had told him that there transmissions tend to get overheated on long trips and that we should stop every hour or so and let it cool off. We did this, and it worked well. We are now back in Winston and the car is doing fine. We are going to have a cooling block put on the transmission, hopefully this will take care of the problem.

Despite the car hiccup, we had a great time in Charleston. On Thursday night, Ryan and Anna took us to dinner at Southend Brewery & Smokehouse. On Friday, Ryan, Laura and I spent the afternoon on the beach at Kiawah Island. Anna works on the Island, so after work she joined us for a bike ride around the Island (not on the beach).

On Saturday, the four of us ran (with 40,000+ other people) in the Cooper River Bridge Run (CRBR) 10K. It is a huge annual Charleston race (event) that happened to be the same weekend that we were there, Laura and I registered for the race on Friday and ran in it on Saturday. On Saturday afternoon, We ate lunch at one of my favorite Charleston spots, Poe's Tavern.

Laura and I walked down King Street and around The Battery on Saturday evening, we then met up with Ryan and Anna at The Kickin' Chicken to watch the final four games and eat dinner.

We had a great time with Ryan and Anna and really enjoyed Charleston!