Boone Hall Plantation - Mount Pleasant, South Carolina

Before he was Dalton and before he stated that no one would place Baby into the vicinity of the intersection of two walls and also before he died, Patrick Swayze was Orry Main in North and South, a mini-series that was a pretty big deal in the early 80s.  In the story, Orry falls in love, makes friends with a Yankee, fights in the Mexican-American War, and eventually fights the Damn Yankees in the Civil War.  If you want a better synopsis, go to IMDB, the Official Movie Database of Pics of Me in Front of Stuff.  I have never seen the mini-series because I was only 3 or 4 when it was aired and I can't say I have a burning desire to see Patrick Swayze in a gray woolen uniform.  My favorite Swayze movie (Swoozie?) had to be Roadhouse partially because it was awesome, partially because I vaguely remember there being exposed boobs, and partially because there was a monster truck.  My second favorite Swoozie was Point Break with Keanu Reeves because Keanu plays Johnny Utah, a former college football star, setting the stage for his appearance in The Replacements.  Also, Gary Busey plays Keanu's partner and Mr. Busey brings a certain level of believable craziness to everything he does.  If you have not seen him on Celebrity Fit Club I suggest you track it down on DVD ASAP.
But this blog is not supposed to be Patrick Swayze's filmography or an ode to Gary Busey being Gary Busey, I did not pay $10 for the domain name of my blog to be Me Talking About Pics of Patrick Swayze.  Nope, this is Pics of Me in Front of Stuff and this time the Stuff is the location of Orry Main's fictional home, Boone Hall Plantation.  That is the real place is called Boone Hall, I have no idea if it has a name in the mini-series.

 

Funny thing is, no pictures of me in this entry.

Boone Hall Plantation came into existence in 1681 when Major John Boone was given a land grant by his father-in-law as a wedding gift.  The original house to stand on the land was not built until 1790 and it supposedly resembled a log cabin as opposed to the antebellum plantation pictured above.  But who really wants to go see what life really looked like in the 1800s?  I want the romanticized version of history.  Who wants to hear about what really went on when the glamorized version from Hollywood is SO much better!  I suggest Choke by Chuck Palahniuk if you want to hear a unique interpretation of the historical reenactment business.  The film with Sam Rockwell is pretty good, too.  Pics of Me in Front of Stuff likes its steaks medium rare and its history romanticized.  Luckily, in the early 20th Century, Thomas Stone, a Canadian diplomat, bought the plantation and built the current house as a gift to his wife.  Thank you, Mr. Stone.  The McRae family currently owns the plantation and allows tours of the first floor of the home which they keep a romanticized version of historically furnished.  The McRae family also does not allow pictures of the interrior of their historically furnished home.

Actually the plantation's most striking feature is not the house, but rather the Avenue of Oaks leading up to the gates of the house.

 

 Who gives a shit about the inside?

I feel like the picture above does not do the oaks justice.  It's not easy taking photos while hanging out the window of Pics of Me in Front of Stuff's white rental car.  Going up that driveway felt like going to visit Scarlett O'Hara from Gone with the Wind.  The Spanish Moss hanging from the American Oaks made for an image that is what most people think of before they visit a plantation.  Can't South Carolina make that requirement a state law?  First, all plantations should have antebellum mansions.  Second, every antebellum mansion should be required to have an Avenue of Oaks as its driveway.  Third, we should be greeted by an elderly sharecropper singing Zippity Doo Dah or Swing Low Sweet Chariot.  Pics of Me in Front of Stuff may start to petition to the South Carolina legislature so they could take care of that right after the Pennsylvania legislature enacts a law preventing the death of Joe Paterno.  I'll leave out my feelings on state laws regarding Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and the Loch Ness Monster because I would not want anyone to lose respect for Pics of Me in Front of Stuff based on my beliefs.

Aside from the Avenue of the Oaks, Boone Hall Plantation is also known as one of America's oldest working plantations.   They grow lots of different produce there as well as cotton and Pics of Me in Front of Stuff learned all about it during the plantation grounds tour from the delightful old driver.  What he was driving was hard to describe but that won't stop me from presenting on.  Consider a school bus chassis on top of which was welded a metal platform covered with a tarp and seats for an open-air tour.  It may have been four-wheel drive but I would not have sat down for a ride if I knew we were going off-roading.  Seeing as how the driver sat at what must have been the console may have come from a 1984 Volkswagen Sciroco, this vehicle screamed DIY.  Mostly the ride stuck to the dirt roads that meandered around the property.  There were cotton fields and strawberry fields and just about any type of produce field you can imagine.  Having lived in rural Pennsylvania most of my life, this was just another ride through the countryside but it was certainly superior to the New Jersey landscape to which I have become accustomed.  It's very different from the grounds of Pics of Me in Front of Stuff Manor.

Can you tell which is which?!

 

Our Friendly driver also managed to show us some of the wildlife roaming around Boone Hall Plantation.  A tiny green tree snake managed to fall on top of him and more or less provide a modicum of excitement for all of the visitors to the Plantation that day.  

I do declare, this gave me the vapors!

 

Let's be honest, Boone Hall Plantation is not a place you go for an adrenaline rush.  Pics of Me in Front of Stuff was there with some elderly people and maybe a few foreign tourists on holiday.  Not the kind of group that you would find base jumping or mountain climbing.  Then again, I have not done either so maybe that is the exact type of crowd you find base jumping.  However, for $10 it is not a bad or expensive way to kill a few hours especially on a warm sunny afternoon in December.  If you have never seen agriculture in action, this may just be the tour for you!

Towson and Baltimore, MD

There are no new photos from the most recent excursion to Baltimore.  This blog is named PICS of Me in Front of Stuff, but there just was not much STUFF that I felt like photographing.  Nothing so momentous occurred that it warranted breaking out the Official Camera of Pics of Me in Front of Stuff.  The usual drinking and cast of characters were in attendance and we all enjoyed the Official Beer of Pics of Me in Front of Stuff Baltimore Trips...

Miller Lite!

Clearly, these ladies just came up when I did an image search of Miller Lite on Google.

Their appearance would have counted as momentous!

However, there are some things we can take away from this weekend in Baltimore.
These are the take home points:

1.  I don't know if I ever looked as young at a bar as the kids with which we played Beer Pong at the CVP  in Towson.  I can not say for sure if they were 21 and honestly I don't care.  I thought I gave up playing beer pong with underage college students after college then after grad school and now I realize it's probably not going to stop in the foreseeable future.

Wow, that sentence above made me feel old.  However, the $1.75 beers and the Power Hour earlier that evening quickly deadened any apprehension I felt Friday night.  It seems consuming 90 oz of beer in 60 minutes does wonders for your self-esteem. I think Adrian Peterson may have done one prior to the NFC Championship game because he can't stop dropping the football.  Amazingly, that was the first time I had partaken in a Power Hour, but it would not be the last time I attempted one.
2.  You should watch The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard.  Just like another forgotten classic featuring Jeremy Piven, PCU,  The Goods will probably be relegated to edited day-time airing on Comedy Central.  I should start a petition to prevent that. 

When someone tells me to wear my boner pants, I wear my boner pants!

Watching The Goods and The Hangover on DVD is still a great way to spend  a hungover afternoon and that's what we did.  I believe I claimed several times that I was going to marry a stripper Saturday night.  Luckily, I did not.  But if there was one that looked like Heather Graham, I might have had to consider offering a proposal.

Will you marry me?

3.  'Move along, loser!' The exact words said to me by some hooch in the Green Turtle in Towson, MD.   My marriage proposal to Heather Graham may have elicited a similar response. Overall, the bar was a decent place and Kelly the Bartender was friendly.  We did a few shots of something or other there and so my memory of the decor is pretty fuzzy.  I vaguely remember a redhead with a giant ass on the dance floor being surround by black guys.  And I also remember the loser comment.  It's really burnt into my brain.  Apparently, my advanced degree, good job, and well-written blog (well, two out of three) are just not enough to impress some people.  Maybe it's my thinning hair or neck fat.

Hello, Ladies!

I'll have to flash the business cards and/or lab coat next time I am in Towson.  Or maybe I will clean up my diet and hit the gym.  There are a multitude of options!
4.  I'll still wonder what would happen if someone had done a drive by motorboat on the exceedingly well endowed young woman sitting near us in Baltimore's Speakeasy Saloon on Saturday night. 

You motorboatin' son of a bitch!

Her escort, some dude wearing an Ed Hardy shirt who I assumed used 'Brah!' in conversation and not in an ironic way, was damn close to doing so while we sat there. It would have made for a very good story if one of us had given that giant set of mammaries a quick bbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrr.  It would certainly have been a better story than what I am working with right now.  
5.  Finally, I learned if you can't finish a Power Hour for the 2nd night in a row, you immediately grow a vagina and apparently it whistles and may or may not have sand in it.  A sandy, whistling vagina is a bad thing. 

Nobody like's a sandy vagina.

I am far from being an expert on that particular organ, but if there is sand in there how does it whistle?  I only have limited access to them and I am sure the thinning hair and neck fat limits that access even more.  Also, does the sound change as sand is cleaned out of there?  I can only imagine.
With that image burnt into your brain, I am going to wrap this up and go watch OT in the NFC Championship game.  Hope you had a great weekend!
Who Dat?!

Fort Sumter - Charleston, South Carolina

Sitting in Pics of Me in Front of Stuff Manor in Central New Jersey by myself watching the New Orleans Saints and Arizona Cardinals turn the Super Dome scoreboard into a pinball machine, I can not help but feel sad and lonely.  No, it's not because the Eagles got demolished by the Dallas Cowboys on Saturday night though that was painful to watch.  Late last week, Pics of Me in Front of Stuff lost the only chief photographer it's ever had.  No, CP did not pass away or a similar catastrophe.  That would be infinitely worse.  Rather she decided her and I needed to go our separate ways.  I will not go into the dynamics of our relationship or the causes for what may appear to some as a sudden development here - that's not for a public forum.  I will leave it that we are no longer together and the past week and a half has been very painful.  I hope by writing this I can feel a little better than I have recently and get past the general malaise that has overcome me recently.
So in happier times and warmer places, CP and I continued our exploration of Charleston, South Carolina by visiting a major landmark in the history of the United States - Fort Sumter.

On  April 12, 1861 Confederate artillery fired the first shots of the Civil War on the island fort in the entrance of Charleston Harbor.  My mustache and I (aka Cleo Possum) were there about 250 years later.

The fort allowed the Confederacy to have control the harbor for the four years that it was under their control.  Union forces never wrested control of Fort Sumter from their enemies until it was abandoned by Confederate forces under the threat of the burning of Charleston by marauding Union forces in the area.  The Union Army never set fire to Charleston, but they did regain control of the fort.  Also, in case you missed it, and I know some of my fellow Americans in the South have, the Union won the war.  While I despise the New York Yankees as a native of Pennsylvania, I technically am a Yankee and I am always pleased to be on the winning side of anything.  I get fired up for the Big 33 Game.  I'll probably yell at the screen during the Winter Olympics.  Maybe I suffer from jingoism or I am just patriotic.
One of my favorite parts of the trip to Fort Sumter was the park ranger mentioning that Fort Sumter was built on YANKEE SOIL!!!  He said it just like that with his surprisingly deep voice.  ALL CAPS and bold with a few exclamation points!!!  While Fort Sumter was built on a sandbar that is not deeply submerged in the harbor there is little rock nearby upon which to build a 5-sided brick structure with walls that are almost 200 feet long and five feet thick.  The rock, 70,000 tons of it, was imported from New Hampshire, the Granite State, deep in the heart of the Yankee north.  It does not get much more north than that in the United States.  So really, the first shots of the Civil War were fired on or at least at Yankee soil.  I guess you could lump Fort Sumter in with Gettysburg as not just Civil War landmarks but also Civil War conflicts on Union Territory.  Obviously, Gettysburg did not go so well for anyone considering how many men lost their lives there, but it went especially bad for Johnny Reb.  Remember who won the war, forgetful Southerners.
Another of my favorite parts of the visit to Fort Sumter was the lovely December weather in Charleston.

The weather was warm and sunny for the ferry ride across the harbor to the fort.  The entire time I spent in Charleston was a reprieve from the New Jersey winter I had just left.  The exact temperature is irrelevant though I imagine it was in the high 50s or low 60s.  The sky was a clear blue and the shined warmly all day.  If the weather is always this lovely in Charleston in December I could imagine living there.  Given the lovely climate during my brief stay I could forsake my Union jingoistic attitude.  However, if it ever turned cold the Yankee in me would rear it's ugly head.

The Hominy Grill - Charleston, South Carolina - State No. 28

This post is beginning at the end, but it's about to jump back to the start and maybe slalom back and forth into whirlpool of chronological order that no one, not even me, the author, can understand.
Why start at the end?
It's certainly not because I am acting like a highly effective person and Beginning with the End in Mind.  I write a blog called Pics of Me in Front of Stuff; I am pretty sure that immediately eliminates me from the Steven Covey's effective army.  I am featuring this picture taken as we were leaving South Carolina because CP felt I needed documentation that we drove through South Carolina and into Georgia.  She's the Chief Photographer, who am I to argue?  So she bent around the seat, possibly while I tried to grab her ass and distracted me from driving to snap a photo of the South Carolina sign.  Since we had started this road strip by flying into Charleston there was no other opportunity to see a sign declaring we were in the Palmetto State.
 CP and I arrived in Charleston on a warm December night.  We ventured out from our hotel for a late dinner since most airlines with airfare cheap enough for me no longer find it necessary to feed their passengers.  That turned out to be fortuitous because Charleston is filled with fantastic restaurants.  I am not nor will I ever claim to be a foodie.  They are a unique breed that get off on finding and savoring delicious food.  They watch Anthony Bourdain for what he eats.  Naturally, they probably assume I am a weirdo for wandering New Jersey and the rest of the country looking for random artifacts in front of which I can be photographed.  I watch Anthony Bourdain for the unique places he visits.  Foodies probably think I am some kind of weirdo.
Touche', foodies.
I would like to suggest a place to eat thanks to that late dinner.  Our walk into the warm Charleston night became a trip to the Hominy Grill.  I believe it may be the World Famous Hominy Grill.

If it wasn't, it is now.

This is actually the following evening, a Sunday evening since the Hominy Grill is not open for dinner on Sundays.  That's the only reason no one is lined up outside waiting to get some fantastic food.  Zigging back in chronological order I'll try and describe just how fantastic the food  that I ate the night before the picture above was taken starting with the She-Crab Soup.  I highly recommend it.

I was unaware that she-crab soup was something of a staple in restaurants in Charleston.  It should be a staple everywhere or at least the Hominy Grill's should be a staple everywhere.  If I had known she-crabs were so delicious I would have started eating them a long time ago.  The delicious soup was soon followed by our main courses: shrimp and grits for me and low country purloo for CP.

Far from being a grits connoisseur or really any kind of connoisseur, I feel required to say these were the best grits I have ever had.  The fact that they were the first grits I have ever had should be ignored because this food was fantastic. Grits reminded me of poi, but minus the wallpaper paste flavor.  I am no foodie so do not look for any kind of fancy descriptive language for the flavors these delicacies ignited on my taste buds.  Wallpaper paste is about as descriptive as I get.  I am more of a poop joke kind of guy although not a poop joke connoisseur.  Let's just say it was delicious and you should go eat there.  Thanks to this meal the Hominy Grill earned the Pics of Me in Front of Stuff Seal of Approval.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Goodbye 2009.

Hello 2010