Carolina Ice Palace

I was scared when I first went to the Carolina Ice Palace because I had never ice skated before. Roller skating was a piece of cake compared to ice skating but luckily for me, they had "walkers" you can hold on to so you wont fall on the ice. They carry children and adult size walkers! It would be great if they had butt pads as well, but thats only wishful thinking =). The Carolina Ice Palace is Charleston's only ice skating rink. They offer a wide variety of services from birthday and group parties, as well as ice and figure skating lessons. Our hockey team, South Carolina Stingrays practice there as well. The Ice Palace also has a Skateboard Park, but I haven't checked that out yet. If you are hungry during a skate session, there is a snack bar with appetizer type items and a bar/lounge for those of you who need your thirst quenched with an ice cold beer. Bored of skating? Then you can check out the game room that is full of arcade games. The Ice Palace has wide variety of fun! more

Nice place to drop off your kids for a few hours while you go shopping or whatever. Has a food court and arcade games. Also can sign your kid (or yourself) up for lessons or sports teams. Skating times are limited and always broken up by the scheduled zamboni runs to re-ice the ice (or whatever it is that the zamboni does). Prices are okay, but can get expensive if you have alot of kids or many adults going at once. Also available spaces for birthday parties, etc. more

The Ice Palace is great, but the one bad thing is that they don't have very long open-skate hours for the public. It's not terribly expensive to get in, but it's not necessarily cheap either (can't remember prices), and you only get an hour and a half to skate and then they scrape time off the middle because the zamboni has to re-zamboni the ice. I didn't think the atmosphere was very friendly and the staff had no problems allowing older, more experienced teenager skaters run rampant around families with little kids who were taking it slow and being mindful to try to stay out of everyone's way. more

A lot of high school teams compete here. There is also a place for regular people to skate and a game room. The only bad experience I have had is almost getting my hand sliced off when I fell, but that was my own fault. There is also the fact that every once in a while you have to evacuate the rink to let a guy drive through. more

The Carolina Ice palace is located next to Northwoods Mall in North Charleston. It is open all day long and after-school they have special activities for kids. They offer all kinds of ice skating activities and you can have birthday parties there, take lessons, etc. They offer lots of special things during the year. They even offer homeschool skating classes. You can eat a light meal there too (like a hamburger, etc.). A great place to skate! more

Yes Way! It's true! The old Kmart, I believe, was transformed from an empty old building into a year-round winter wonderland. THe skating sessions are short. That's okay, because I've only been on the ice once. It hurt and was cold when you fell, which I did alot. The nice people there offered me one of those "walker" looking things for me to use so that I wouldn't fall, but I'd have to say I'd rather fall every 2 minutes rather than skating around with one of those things. If you've never ice-skated before, you have to use your ankles, and that hurts too. It's fun, though, and you can get hot-dogs and stuff there as well. Watch out for the 8-year old hecklers who have no problem putting your tired, out-of-shape-butt to shame as you waddle around the rink. They will laugh at you when you fall, which is funny the first 3 times, but becomes tiring after that. Get there early to watch the zamboni! more