Travels for Work - Columbia, South Carolina

I am currently sitting in my hotel room at the Clarion and tomorrow begin another fun deployment at a company here in Columbia, South Carolina. Today was a hellacious day because I have spent most of it on a plane. Diana and I were in Amarillo, Texas this weekend visiting a friend and I had to fly from Amarillo to Dallas to Columbia today and landed around 5:30 p.m.

Columbia is the capital of South Carolina yet as I drove around today I can't say it screams "STATE CAPITAL!". It is a nice enough town from what I have seen but nothing so majestic that I would instantly recognize it as a special place.

I went and took in 'The Losers' at the local mall tonight and felt like I had entered the Twilight Zone. Their mall is like nothing I have ever seen. It had no real front entrance and after circling the entire building, I found the Barnes and Nobles right next to the T.G.I.Fridays and guessed this was the place. I never saw a sign for the movie theatre but assumed it was inside and after being unable to find it, I checked the mall map.

What's this? The mall is on the roof? Huh? So I got on the elevator and went up to the roof and found nothing. It opened to a parking lot. I went back down and tried going to another area of the mall but it took me back to the roof. I finally found a mall cop and asked and apparently the theatre was up there but on a totally different part. I went back to my car and drove up the three ramps of the parking garage to the roof, silly me I hadn't thought to park up there, and finally found the theatre.

I was blown away. Sitting on the top of a two story mall was a 7 screen movie theatre that had absolutely no signs other than the small lettering above the door that said Regal 7 Theatres. I would never have found it. FYI: check out the movie. It was a lot of fun to watch.

After dinner I wanted to try something local so I drove around and found Bojangles' Famous Chicken 'n Biscuits. I was greeted by a ton of black people so I knew it was going to be good. This nice old black lady named Nancy recommended I get the Supreme, which was 4 chicken fingers, fries and a biscuit and I was not disappointed. And this was at 9:30 so it was not the freshest it could have been. I love that it was named Bojangles. That seems kind of racist since they sell fried chicken but I honestly can't say why.

That is all,

Newt