There’s No Place Like the SC Lowcountry

We were sitting in Adirondack chairs. Elizabeth was drinking a margarita lightly salted. I was enjoying a Blue Moon with an orange. The sun was going down over the Beaufort County inlet when she looked at me and said, “we can travel the world, but there is no place like the South Carolina lowcountry.”

One week earlier we were enjoying Guinness in a Dublin pub. Days prior we were watching the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace and days before that were taking in the liberal culture of Amsterdam. I came from humble beginnings. My parents never had much and when they divorced, we had even less. We rarely left the Carolinas. In fact, I only remember once or twice. I grew up watching old westerns, wondering what Texas must really be like. As I entered middle school, Beverley Hills 90210 became popular and I dreamed of seeing California. I watched Tom Hanks jump along a giant floor piano in New York City. Even further was Magnum P.I.’s Hawaii or James Bond’s London and Paris. Travel became my obsession and I knew I had to break out of my hometown and do something more so that I could see the world.

When we got married in 2005, Elizabeth and I decided to hold off on kids so that we would have the time and financial resources to travel. In recent years my eyes have seen places I thought they would only see through a television or computer screen. And now I’m even doing business regularly in places like Austin, Texas and San Francisco, California.

Travel is still my obsession. I want to set foot on every continent. I want experience different cultures. I want to see it all. But the more I travel, the more I realize that I haven’t seen it all right here at home. The more I see and the more I taste, the more I come to appreciate America’s south.