Back from South Carolina

I guess I didn't actually mention that we were going anywhere, but I'm feeling the need to "check in" now that we're home. We had a great long weekend visiting family in South Carolina and wish we'd had longer to stay. During our trip, we got to briefly explore the towns of Anderson and Greenville and were surprised to find both packed with fun family activities.

On our first day, we visited downtown Greenville, which is full of charm, nice restaurants and cute shops - plus a plethora of coffee shops which always swings my vote. The best surprise, however, was Falls Park, a gorgeous park with - you guessed it - a waterfall running through the middle. We checked out the view from the suspension bridge, meandered down to feed the ducks and let the kids explore the amphitheater (currently staged for a production). Our limited time there made me wish we'd brought a picnic and a soccer ball to kick around - and some running shoes, since my new patent wedges didn't serve me well through all the climbing.

Something else I wish we'd had time for was a fun scavenger hunt through downtown. As a senior project, high school student Jimmy Ryan proposed the idea of placing nine bronze mice downtown for children to hunt. He raised funding and commissioned a local sculptor to make the mice. A bronzed sculpture of the book and one mouse are mounted on the fountain in front of the Hyatt Regency hotel, and the other eight mice are installed along a nine-block stretch of downtown. Recently, a children's book entitled Mice on Main was written about the project.