Mount Pleasant and Vicinity

East of Charleston, across the beautiful Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge, is the town of Mount Pleasant, named not for a mountain but for a plantation founded there in the early 18th century. In its Old Village neighborhood are antebellum homes and a sleepy, old-time town center with a drugstore where patrons still amble up to the soda fountain and lunch counter for egg-salad sandwiches and floats. Along Shem Creek, where a dwindling shrimping fleet still brings in the daily catch, several seafood restaurants serve some of the area's freshest (and most deftly fried) seafood. Other attractions in the area include military and maritime museums, a plantation, and, farther north, the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge.