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How to live your best tourist life in the Holy City

Staff Report //April 27, 2018//

How to live your best tourist life in the Holy City

Staff Report //April 27, 2018//

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Visitors to Charleston can now save themselves, and their long-suffering children (we know because we can see it on their faces), from the $64,000 question: What to do once they have arrived in our fair city.

Keith Simmons, publisher of Traveler of Charleston Visitor Magazine, has created the Charleston Tour Pass to help tourists “save time, money and the hassle of researching where to go and what to do.”

Forget Google, Yelp, Trip Advisor and all those other handy but overwhelming review sites. Visitors (or locals, we aren’t judging) can now just purchase a pass to some of the area’s most popular attractions — including Boone Hall Plantation, Bulldog Tours walking tours, and Charleston Harbor Tours boat tours — and get other admissions for free. And we don’t just mean the admission that we still haven’t done half of these yet even though we’ve totally meant to since we moved here. 14 years ago. Oops.

Simmons said, “With so many incredible tours, attractions, restaurants and sights to see, we know it can be a little overwhelming for visitors to decide what to do.”

It’s really nice to see someone trying to help all those tourists who flood our streets, paralyzed by indecision — not to be confused with the water that floods our streets, paralyzed by lack of drainage.

The options are a one-, two-, three- or five-day pass (staying here for four days is simply not an option, folks) at varying price points. The one-day pass includes one of the nine “featured” tours; the two- and three-day passes include two featured tours; and the five-day pass includes three featured tours.

All passes include certain “unlimited” privileges as well. Critical detail: This does mean you can go to as many of them as you want; it does not mean you can go as many times as you want. So you can enjoy a tasting at the Firefly Distillery and lunch or dinner at Lewis Barbecue and a visit to McLeod Plantation Historic Site and The Gibbes Museum of Art and the Nathaniel Russell House Museum and, and, and. Once.

So with 19 items currently on that unlimited list, we are hereby issuing the challenge: Can anyone actually visit all 19 in one, two, three or five (not four) days? We figure you’d probably see the inside of your Uber way more than any of the actual attractions, but your belly would be full and you could at least check all the other stuff off your bucket list… CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

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