Transmission trouble. Hilton Head

This week is Laura's spring break, so we decided that I could skip class and we could take a trip. We left Tuesday morning, headed for Hilton Head. Our plan was to spend two nights in Hilton Head and then drive up to Charleston and spend 3 nights with Ryan and Anna Thompson there.

At about 12:45 Tuesday afternoon we were passing through Columbia, SC, when the transmission in our car gave out. We spent about 1.5 hours on the side of the interstate, then we were towed to "the best transmission place in Columbia." At this point we did not know what was wrong with our car, we hoped that it was something that could be quickly fixed so that we could resume our trip to Hilton Head. Unfortunately, we learned that our car would not be ready to go again until Thursday afternoon. At that point we had a couple of options, we could spend the first few days of our trip in Columbia, SC, or we could try to rent a car and get to Hilton Head. We opted for the latter. Essentially every rental car place in Columbia was out of vehicles, but thankfully we finally found someone who had one car left, Rent-A-Wreck. We jumped on the opportunity to take over a Chevy Cavalier for a few days.

After our unexpected detour in Columbia, we left at around 5:00 for Hilton Head...in our new (temporary) ride.

In Hilton Head, we stayed at the Crowne Plaza Resort. We loved the resort and the Island! Despite our car troubles, we had a great time there! On Tuesday night we went for a run around the plantation that our resort was on, then went to a sports bar for a late dinner. On Wednesday, we decided to bike to the Harbour Town Lighthouse and check it out, then bike to The Salty Dog Cafe for lunch, then back to the resort of an evening on the beach. The island has great bike trails that follow major roads and make it easy to get around. It ended up being a bit more difficult than we anticipated, mainly because our bike trails kept dead ending into resorts. After riding around on the island for an hour or so, we decided that it would be better to just get on the beach and bike around the island until we came to the lighthouse. After biking on the beach for a while we decided that the lighthouse could wait and we should just get lunch. We finally made it to the Cafe and had a great, lunch there. If you are ever on Hilton Head, you have to check out The Salty Dog Cafe! After eating we biked back to our resort, via the beach. The excursion took a bit longer than we had anticipated, but we had a great time. On Wednesday night, we ate dinner at the Old Fort Pub. A very nice seafood restaurant on the water that I would highly recommend, catch a sunset there if you can!

We got up early Thursday morning so that we could see the sunrise on the beach, unfortunately it looked like a tropical storm was coming in...so there was no sun to be seen. We ate breakfast and packed up before going on a run around the plantation. We checked out of the hotel and decided to drive over to the lighthouse and eat lunch before leaving the island. We ate lunch at The Water Front Cafe, another great restaurant that I would recommend visiting.

We are now in Charleston, but the car saga has continued... more to come.