There is ALWAYS something to do in Columbia, South Carolina, which is one of my favorite things about living here. Today we chose a regular family favorite, the Soda City, our awesome weekly street market, where we ran into a friend of my husband’s from college, local artist Sean McGuinness. We didn’t bring the puppies this time since we were meeting a friend for lunch, but Soda City is a great, dog-friendly event that lets Fido get his social fix, too. Unfortunately, Riverfront Park remains closed from the historic flooding we had last Fall, but I’m looking forward to this summer we can combine a run along the canal with the dogs and a trip to Soda City.
Along with the street market we visited a few of the great stores along Main Street. Valentine’s Day weekend or not, we would have stopped Sylvan’s Jewelers, to see their recent remodel, which is stunning – I was so happy to see the character of the original store remain. I’ll have to post about them again when they update their website with new pics. After showing infinite patience while we did some Valentine’s Day shopping, the kids begged for a stop into Mast General Store to sample the barrel candy, and how could we possibly deny them? Point of interest: Mast General is dog-friendly, so feel free to let Fido get his shopping on, too!
For lunch, we chose Michael’s Cafe, which is definitely a favorite of mine as evidenced by how many of our Girls on the Run lunchtime meetings “happen” to get scheduled there. We met up with a friend who lives downtown and I finally got to see her lovely apartment with all its exposed brick… sadly, just as she packs up to move back to DC. Living in the downtown Columbia area has become the ‘thing’ to do, and this has really revitalized the area in the past few years. Turns out I know several people in the building, but that shouldn’t surprise me since Columbia, while a large capital city, feels a lot like a small town.
Overall, we had a very nice Saturday morning to kickstart the weekend. We have lots of domestic/family stuff to do or we could have enjoyed ourselves downtown all day. There just so much about ‘Famously Hot’ Columbia to talk about and to recommend – way more than this tiny sampling. We have the State Museum, the art museum, the zoo, the children’s museum, the Nickelodeon Theatre, the historic district, the Vista, Five Points, Koger Center, the SC Philharmonic, the Trustus Theatre, Colonial Life Arena, the Town Theatre, the Village Square Theatre… it goes on and on. And the restaurants! Haven’t even started listing the restaurants. I feel the same way about my other home of Knoxville, Tennessee and could probably support a blog writing about just those two places. Maybe I’ll make a couple categories and make them semi-regular topics and show my cities some love.
