{All In a Day} SC State House Steps + President Woodrow Wilson's Boyhood Home

With all of our cross country treks visiting presidential sites and running up and down state capitol steps, can you believe that we had yet to visit a couple of spots right here in our own home state???

Hubby had some army work to do in Columbia today, and we tagged along for the ride...

  

Sure, we've driven past the South Carolina State House numerous times...

but we've never actually explored the grounds...

nor conquered the state house steps, until today...

It was cold...

and George is still quite upset about what Sherman's troops did to his cane...

As we were walking back to the car, M asked what that was peeking above the trees and exclaimed, "Is that Cinderella's castle?" 

Clearly, it's time for a trip back to Walt Disney World, or maybe a first trip to Disneyland???

After a yummy pizza lunch at Village Idiot...

we took a tour of South Carolina's only presidential site (besides the possible, but probable, birthsite of President Andrew Jackson), the Woodrow Wilson Family Home...

Now, we have stopped and tried to visit before...

{July 2013}

but the home just reopened last year after undergoing extensive restoration...

The only home that the Wilson family owned, they built this house from the ground up, but only lived here a few years before relocating to Wilmington, NC...

After a fun dinner on the way home, at one of our favorite dives, the Beacon Drive-In...

we concluded our daylong adventure to our state's capital city!

A Challenge or Two...or Maybe, Three

As many of our family members and friends (plus anyone else who has read this blog for any period of time) know, we love to travel, and we are not afraid of the car suburban.  We love a good family road trip, and we set a goal quite some time ago to get our children to all 50 states before they graduate high school.

The first time that I remember taking photos to actually document a new state visit was on our family trip to Walt Disney World in 2011.  This was, in fact, the girls' first trip to Florida...

but B had been once before - all the way down to Key West - accompanying Hubby and me to Bestie S's wedding!

Now, with family spanning from all the way down on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to up in New York City, and the fact that we almost always drive to visit everyone, our children have been fairly well-traveled (as far as the Eastern U.S.A. is concerned) from the time that they were born, without us really putting much thought into it.  I think that B had about 13 states under his belt before L was even born - when he was 2 1/2 years old.

Anyway, things really got fun once our family was complete, and more so, once M was out of those little baby years.  Add in that shortly before that time, when B was just barely 4 years old, he really got interested in the U.S. Presidents. 

The only thing that I can trace it back to is, February 2010 and doing what I always did (and still do), changing out our monthly "theme" books related to that time of year.  February included Valentine's Day books, of course, plus a couple of books on the U.S. Presidents, along with a big poster of the U.S. Presidents from a Scholastic Weekly Reader way back when!

This is where my past as a kindergarten teacher comes in quite helpful!

B loved that poster and immediately started learning the names and numbers of each of the Presidents.  From there, he just wanted to learn more...

He decided that his favorites were both James K. Polk "because he is my favorite number, #11" and Woodrow Wilson "because I like his ears".  Well, what would you expect?  He was just newly 4 years old at the time...

From that, came another goal, to get B to as many sites related to the U.S. Presidents as possible - birthsites, homes, gravesites, monuments, anything.

Our first check on that list came along one of our regular trips home after a visit with family in Pennsylvania.  We stopped in Staunton, VA at the birthplace of President Woodrow Wilson...

Fast forward a few years, and with our second "official" Summer Family Road Trip (2013) in the books...  Freshly home from our grand adventure, we were at the beach and reminiscing about that trip that took us up to Maine and back, and Pops (Hubby's father) told B how many capitol buildings that he had been to and asked him to guess which ones...  He went on to tell B all about walking the steps to the top of the dome of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver.  That's the moment right there that B decided to challenge himself and set a goal to get to each state's capitol building and run up the steps to the front door.

At that moment in the summer of 2013 (after we'd just traveled up and down the East Coast!), he had only one capitol building under his belt - the New Hampshire State House in Concord, and that was by presidential default...

Thank you, President Franklin Pierce!

So, with all that being said, don't be surprised if you start to see a few "Challenge Checklist" posts popping up on here documenting both our completed States & State Capitol Buildings and U.S. Presidents, once we, as a family, deem them completely checked off!