Charles Apple

What a wonderful day for a seven-hour drive from Virginia Beach to Columbia, S.C., where I’m teaching two news design classes tomorrow.

It was sunny most of the day. I had the Deerslayer’s sun roof open and Brian Wilson blaring from the iPod. You couldn’t have asked for a better time.

I checked into my room at the Marriott Courtyard, next door to the headquarters of the South Carolina Press Association, near the intersection of Interstates 20 and 26, on the west side of Columbia. I spent a couple of hours tweaking my slideshows and then I found myself with several more hours of daylight to burn. Why not zip downtown and take a few photos of the gorgeous state Capitol building to post here in the blog?

First, though, I checked the weather radar at Wunderground. And I was glad I did: A big line of thunderstorms was just about to hit. I decided to surf Facebook for a while until they blew over.

But as it turned out, “blew” was the operative word. The storm was HUGE. There was an enormous amount of rain and wind. Branches came down all over the place.

There was a report of large hail not far from here. Thinking I might be in the middle of a news story, I pulled out my camera, opened the sliding glass door to my room and began shooting outside. It’s a pity these shots look relatively calm: It was a madhouse out there:

The wind even ripped the screen door off the hinges of my room. Oops! And then it knocked the power off here in the area around the hotel.

After a half-hour or so, I decided I’d venture out for some dinner. When I got to the lobby, though, I ran into my pal Graham Kimbrough of the Southeastern Newspaper Publishers Association and Bill Rogers, executive director of the S.C. Press Association, who were thinking the same thing.

I tagged along with them as we drove down the street to Lexington, where we ate at Hudson’s Smokehouse Barbecue. Terrific stuff.

Hudson’s Smokehouse, from the restaurant’s web site.
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It was trivia night at Hudson’s, so Graham, Bill and I learned we know who Brett Favre might play for this year and who has won the most NBA championships but we can’t name the four houses of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts school.

The power was on when we returned, but Graham and Bill wanted to visit a small joint across the street from the hotel where locals hang out for karaoke. I’ve never sung karaoke — and I don’t intend to start anytime soon — but I tagged along again, just for fun.

What I learned: a) Folks in South Carolina prefer their karaoke to be country music. And b) When someone gets up to sing You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, leave. Immediately.

I’m told we have about 20 people signed up for tomorrow’s session. Barring power outages and Righteous Brothers songs, we should have a great day.

As soon as I’m done, I’ll drive the 90 minutes or so to Thomson, Ga., to spend a couple of days with my Dad.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 5:54 am and is filed under Charles Apple, Travelogue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.