Opened The Box

I looked up that second Mount Pleasant location on the net last night and neither one of yesterday’s places were, as I suspected, the official PO. The actual CPU was about a mile down the road in another shopping center. Amendment 1 to the Post Office Photo Safari Constitution was created today. It reads: While still in the area of an unlocatable Post Office from the Big List, it is perfectly acceptable to search the USPS web site to find the updated Post Office and subsequentially photograph it. So first thing this morning we went back over the Cooper River Bridge, and like yesterday it was just as the sun was coming up. With only a slight bit of drama we found the Mount Pleasant CPU tucked inside a place called Smoker Friendly.

A ten mile dash on I-526 led us to North Charleston where our first originally scheduled Post Office of the day caused a real problem. 1050 E Montague Avenue had a regular blue box outside, along with a blue distribution box, but zero outward signs of actually being a Post Office. The sign hanging off the front and the gold painted letters on the window both proclaimed this was Aunt Bea’s Restaurant. I took a photo anyway, then we circled the block just in case, but no other evidence of postal activity was found.

The next Post Office, according to my Google map, was not too far away at the point where E Montague met up with US52, AKA Rivers Ave. When we got to there though the address numbers were in the low four thousands. Ack. We headed north in the hopes that the blocks were short, they weren’t, after about 5 miles we found the Post Office. Trouble was we now had to back track all that way because there was still one more PO in North Charleston to get. After that we needed to go back north further than that pesky North Charleston PO to get the ones in Goose Creek, Charleston Southern University and Ladson.

Once through with Post Offices the weather had warmed enough that we could drive home with the top down. About 15 miles from home I added Amendment 2 to the Post Office Photo Safari Constitution, to wit: It is acceptable to shoot a new Post Office not on the Big List when it was created several years ago or to retake a Post Office photo if it has been updated or replaced since the Big List was created, only if said Post Office is plainly visible from the driver’s seat while traveling the roads of South Carolina and as long as that travel wasn’t specifically for the purpose of taking a photo of said Post Office.

Almost exactly 5 years ago when we started this adventure, the town of Windsor was using a trailer for their Post Office, in the intervening years the trailer was replaced by a regular building.