I might as well say it: There’s a bit of pressure a girl puts on herself when she’s the hostess. It’s made doubly so when the occasion is an entire weekend for your high school friends (the Wise Women) spent in your adopted—and rather foreign to them—homeland.

I needn’t have fretted a single second. From the first moments of their carefully coordinated arrival times at the Columbia airport to our it-went-by-sooo-fast goodbye hugs, South Carolina wrapped its sweet arms around us in a gentle and lovely way.

And then we visited Botany Bay. Do I have a story to tell you about Botany Bay.

the road in