It had been a number of years since we were in the southeast (excluding Washington, D.C., which we visit every couple years. A return trip was long overdue. This trip covered parts of South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia and, of course, D.C. It was bookmarked by two of our favorite cities:

Charleston, South Carolina, where we visited a number of historical sites and took two historic tours, as well as caught up on some of the city’s restaurants.

Washington, D.C., where we revisited a number of the city’s neighborhoods, extraordinary museums and historic sites, took a walking tour and of course, caught up on new restaurants.

It also included another of our favorites—Asheville, North Carolina, where we explored the city’s amazing art (public and for sale) and music scenes, hiked, and you guessed it—caught up with restaurants.

It also gave us a chance to spend a little quality hiking time in the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah National Park and to visit a number of places we have not been to before. These included:

• Columbia, South Carolina, for a quick driving tour of some of the city’s highlights. Although Charleston was the original state capital, Columbia was designated its successor in 1786. In 1865, three-quarters of the city was consumed in a fire set by William Tecumseh Sherman’s army. Some buildings, such as the statehouse, governor’s mansion, and much of the University of South Carolina’s Columbia campus escaped the flames. The beautiful copper-domed State House was built over a 52-year period (1855-1907) and suffered only a few cannonball strikes (the remnants of which remain) from the Union Army.

  Blue Marlin is a very nice downtown restaurant where we had lunch of very good fried Apalachicola oysters with fries, salad and tartar sauce, and a moderately overly salted, but still good shrimp and grits with andouille sausage and tasso gravy.

• Charlotte, North Carolina (where we stayed and visited friends), and then Winston-Salem and Greensboro (through which we took brief, self-guided, Sunday (when both cities are virtually shut down) tours; and

• Appomattox (for the Civil War surrender site), Skyline Caverns (in Front Royal) and Quantico (for the Marine Corps Museum).

The following posts provide an overview of some of our most interesting experiences.