49 Down and 318 To Go

According to the idiots who started me on this quest, there are 367 Post Offices in South Carolina. After today’s 160 mile, seven PO trip we are 13% of the way towards the goal of getting a picture of everyone.

We stopped in Greenwood after getting both Post Offices there for some lunch at a place called T.W. Boon?s. We split a Shrimp Po-boy, Onion Rings and a Sierra Mist.

The Postal Gallery Database site says 367, but I can not get a definitive list from the US Postal Service site. If I search from Columbia (which is pretty much in the center of the state) with a hundred mile radius I get 488 results. This probably isn’t accurate because it may include surrounding states, when I search from Aiken for a 100 miles it starts to list Augusta, Georgia POs.

Wikipedia lists 541 Zip Codes in the state. When I went through that list and removed the ones that said PO Box after the name I end up with 404. But I know that isn’t right because there are only 2 Post Offices in Aiken and I was left with 4 zips. Plus there were 5 or 6 names I removed that I recognized as having buildings (because I have pictures of them), so I’m thinking that the PO Box designation means there is no carrier service in those locations.

The USPS site may not even be 100% accurate as to how many it has either. When we first started this quest it listed a Post Office in the micro-town of Snelling, SC and no amount of driving the few streets in that town using the USPS site’s map resulted in a find. Same thing happened in Hilton Head where we could only find two of the four the site had listed for there. Searching today lists no P.O. for Snelling and 3 for Hilton Head.

Anyway, we may never know if we get all of them, but we sure are going to try.

Tonight we had dinner out with friends at Olive Oils right here in Aiken. Grilled Chicken Breast topped with Proscuito and Cheese for him. Seafood Ravioli for her. Water to drink. All the salad and breadsticks you can eat included.