Restaurant Crawl in Charleston

Trixie and Dixie are life long friends.  Dixie is 3 months older than Trixie but they have gone to the same church and the same school and lived in the same small town for all their lives.  If you know them, you know that some of these stories are really true and some are “slightly” exaggerated and some of you will figure out which is which.  Also names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. 

To really understand them, you have to know that Trixie is kind of fancy and likes to wear sparkly clothes!  Dixie is plain and likes to wear denim.  They both have brothers but Dixie has more and gets a lot of her ways from her brothers.  She likes to say things like, “as my brothers always say… ‘ which is misleading because her brothers are very different and  most of the sayings come from one or two of them.  One of her brothers is very funny and is just like Dixie in that he says whatever he thinks.  Once at church this very sweet church lady (and I really mean sweet!  She probably was the sweetest nicest lady that I have ever known) said that Dixie and her brother looked like twins!  They immediately started singing that song, “Sisters, two adorable sisters, Lord, help the mister who comes between me and my sister, and Lord, help the sister who comes between me and my man!”  I think that song is in White Christmas, anyway Rosemary Clooney is one of the ones that sings it!  I think it surprised the lady but she was too sweet to do anything but laugh at them.  That same church lady said in one of the circles that a missionary couple could not go back on the mission field because they couldn’t get a visa.  And then she said, "I didn’t know you had to have a credit card to go on the mission field!"  LOL!

They have some partners in crime, usually Trixie’s daughter, Dixie Belle, and sometimes, Merita, who is Dixie’s niece but almost her daughter.

The story that I am going to tell you today happened during spring break several years ago although neither Merita nor Trixie have spring break.  Dixie had read an article in Southern Living about a restaurant crawl in Charleston, SC.  What you do is go to all these restaurants and have an appetizer in one and a salad in one and a main dish in one and dessert in the final one.

Now all three like to eat and this seemed like a great idea at the time for them to travel to Charleston and go on this restaurant crawl as described in the magazine.  By the way, what could be a better job than to work for Southern Living as a food editor?  They get to go to all these great restaurants in Charleston and order EVERYTHING on the menu!!  It said that in the article!  And put it on an expense account! And they are skinny so they must just eat one bite of each thing!  I think I would just like to go with them and eat what they don’t eat! 

So early one morning Trixie, Dixie and Merita set out for the 3 hour trip (not unlike Gilligan’s 3 hour tour) to Charleston.  First they had to go see Dixie’s friend, Geraldine, (which is her real name because I cannot make up a better name than that one) in order to take her some frozen yeast rolls that Dixie had made from spelt flour.  Geraldine doesn’t eat wheat and you cannot buy these in store so Dixie makes them for her.  Geraldine lives on the way to Charleston but when they arrived there, Dixie realized that she had left all her medication at home so they had to turn around and go back to get it.  This was a thirty minute trip so that added about an hour to their trip.  But you would not want to be with Dixie if she was not on her medication!

They had decided to take Merita’s car because Trixie and Dixie both had old cars and they did not know if their cars would make it for the 250 mile trip.  No one looked at Merita’s tires and they went happily on their way.   Unfortunately when people say someone has steel showing on their tires they were not talking about Merita’s tires because her tires were almost all steel and no rubber!  So when they got a little more than half way to Charleston, they had a blow out on one of the back tires.  Luckily, Merita was able to steer the car to the side of the interstate with her excellent driving skills!  So they had to get out and try to change the tire.  Now Merita had just lost her job due to downsizing and the fact that her nice boss had died and the other two bosses who were his sons were jerks so she had to move out of her apartment and somehow all of her clothes were in her trunk in black garbage bags!  And the spare tire was under all these bags!  

So here they are looking like the Squatley’s unloading their trunk on the side of the interstate.  For some reason Merita stayed in the car and let Trixie and Dixie get out.  Now Trixie and Dixie act like they are young but they are no longer in the first stages of youth and in fact might be middle age – that is, if they plan on living to be about 120 years old! 

Anyway, here are these two lovely ladies out on the side of the interstate taking all these garbage bags full of clothes out and laying them on the side of the road so they can get to the tire.  They had no idea how to change the tire when they got it out, they didn’t know how to get it out, and they didn’t know where the jack was or how to work the jack.

Dixie immediately called her brother who is not the funny one but can do an exact imitation of the guy in Sling Blade that will make you wet your pants laughing and told him that this child needs new tires and she doesn’t have a job and he has to buy her a new set.  He said what he knew to say which was OK. 

In the meantime, a very nice couple who were even older than the two of them was going up the road and saw them on the side of the road and the man told his wife, “Honey, those ladies look like they need help!”  and they surely did so he turned around and came back to them and changed the tire.  Then he helped them put all the garbage bags full of clothes back in the car and led them to Wal-Mart so they could get new tires.  He said it was a wonder that they weren’t all killed because the tires were so bad.   And the man at Wal-Mart said the same thing and her brother paid for the tires!

So once that all happened they went happily on their way again and soon arrived in Mount Pleasant where Dixie has been a bunch of times and got lost trying to find the motel which is one that Dixie has stayed in many times.  They finally found the motel and had to take a rest because of all that stress.

 Now one of the things about the restaurant crawl was that the people in the magazine did it at night.  Trixie, Dixie and Merita didn’t want to do it at night because the food is more expensive and they did not want to drive in Charleston’s confusing streets after dark (many one way streets!  Dixie went the wrong way down one of them last year – and in fact has done the same thing in a town in NC in the middle of the night so you might want to avoid driving with her or meeting her in the road!) so they decided to eat at a restaurant that was near the motel and, oddly enough, it is called Gilligan’s.  Their food is very delicious but they have a lot of fried food.  I do not think the food editors ate there.  Dixie, Trixie and Merita ate there with one of Dixie’s brothers and his family. 

So the next day they decided to start the crawl.  Dixie had picked out several restaurants and certain things that the food editors said to get in that restaurant and had even gotten maps from Yahoo maps.  So they went over the big bridge into Charleston where they drove around in circles for a long time.  Finally they decided to get out and walk.  They couldn’t find any of the restaurants except for one and it didn’t open until dinner.  Then they had to eat in this horrible French restaurant because they couldn’t find any good ones that weren’t packed.  Then they finally found this other French restaurant after hours of looking and were able to get this toasted cake that they described in the article.  It was yummy. 

After that they just gave up on the restaurant crawl and went to the beach and then out to dinner with two of Dixie’s brothers because one of them just happened to be in Hilton Head for spring break. So they didn’t get to eat like the food editors at Southern Living but they had fun and Merita got a new set of tires!  The tire is below!