Well friends, I'm back from our little mini-vacation. As always the plane performed flawlessly as did the pilot! The cabin service consisted of water, peanut butter pretzels and apples. Not a nutritional diet, but it was food.
Our hotel room unfortunately, overlooked the parking lot. I'd like to say that a room without a view is a first for us, but when we stayed in New Orleans a few years ago, we looked out on a parking lot as well as the back entry to restaurants for food delivery. A room with a view comes with a premium price, and our two days in Hilton Head, wasn't going to allow us to much time to be in the room.
We had a nice dinner on Friday night. The food was good, but the service was slow and the price was high. Jeff and I have gotten used to not eating out very often, other than at Bob Evans or Cracker Barrel, where the cost for dinner is reasonable.
Saturday morning we ate the breakfast buffet at the hotel, which cost $17 each. I know that buffets have to make eggs in large volumes, so that they end up being a bit watery. I'll admit I'm spoiled. Jeff still does and has been making me scrambled eggs for 41 years and they are simply the best.
We went out to the airport and the "boys" had some kind of pilot class. We ladies boarded a tram and had a wonderful local lady who gave us a tour of the island. Hilton Head has a lot of history and she was very good at showing us some of the island's most interesting places. Bonus - she also stopped at a small shopping area, and we had 30 minutes to shop. Heaven!
Back at the airport we had a barbecue lunch, beans, cole slaw, chicken, corn bread and cookies. The meal was very tasty and though I'm not a barbecue fan, the chicken was really good.
Jeff joined me on the afternoon tour through the neighborhoods of the Gullah people. The Gullah are the descendants of enslaved Africans who live in the low country region in South Carolina and George. They speak an English-based creole language containing many African words and influenced by African languages in grammar and sentence structure.
In Africa, the people had cultivated African Rice for possibly up to 3,000 years. Once British colonial planters in the American South discovered that rice would grow in that region, they often sought enslaved Africans from rice-growing regions because of their skills and knowledge needed to develop and build irrigation, dams and earthworks.
Interesting facts:
The folk song Michael Row the Boat Ashore (or Michael Row Your Boat Ashore) comes from the Gullah culture. It is also claimed that the origin of Kum Bah Yah, which phrase is in Gullah dialect, is in this culture.
Gullah spirituals, shouts, and other musical forms employ the ""call and response"" method commonly used in African music.
Gullah "sweet grass baskets" are coil straw baskets made by the descendants of slaves in the South Carolina low country, and are almost identical to coil baskets made by the people in Senegal.
Gullah "strip quilts" mimic the design of cloth woven with the traditional strip loom used throughout West Africa, such as Kente cloth from Ghana and Akwete cloth from Nigeria are woven on the strip loom.
A non-English song of unknown meaning, preserved by a Gullah family, was found in the 1990s to be a Mende funeral song, probably the longest text in an African language to survive enslavement to the present day USA.
While we had our lunch, there was two Gulla gentlemen making the sweet grass baskets, and it was simply amazing to watch them weave them with what looked like so little effort into something so beautiful.
Saturday night, we had dinner at a restaurant overlooking the water. Another excellent dinner, which ended with chocolate creme brule, which was fabulous.
We left the island on Sunday about 1:00 and made it back to Frederick in time to pick up a few necessities at Wal-Mart before heading home.
Many COPA people were responsible for the transportation, the tours and the wonderful food we had. A big thanks goes out to each and everyone of them.
P
Here's a sweet grass basket, which you can see is just beautiful.
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