Reluctantly, we left the Brunswick Manor and headed north on I-95. We hit our first curtain of rain near the state line. At the South Carolina Visitors Center we learned that the roads into Beaufort were open but that the shrimp festival - the event around which this trip had been conceived - was called off.
Turning off of the Interstate, we drove across marshes and discovered that there is something moodily fitting about low-lying clouds in the Low Country. We splashed into Beaufort and pulled into the downtown Best Western, where a friendly receptionist gave us a discount.
The town looked mostly unchanged since my first visit nine years earlier, though the bookstore that displayed Pat Conroy's novels in its front window was gone. But there were two used bookstores in town, including a new one, Nevermore Books, where I had a pleasant chat with the owner and bought Reynolds Price's unfinished memoir Midstream (an appropriate title, it occurred to me, for this trip). A few doors down the dingy motel where I'd spent a night was now a fancy boutique hotel.
It was raining so hard in the evening that we drove the two blocks to Saltus River Grill. Our waitress was an older woman and the most endearing of the many gracious servers we had on the trip. "I have trouble hearing," she confessed after asking Hania to repeat her order. "And reading small print. And I work in a restaurant that's loud and dark."
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