We left Saturday for a quick vacation. We haven’t been anywhere in several years,
and after Skyguy’s cancer diagnosis, we promised ourselves that we would start taking vacations as soon as the hospital bills were paid. You gotta live life and not work ALL the time. We’ve spent the last 4 days soaking up South Carolina’s Lowcountry culture and riding bikes. We camped at a KOA to keep costs down, and we took a lot of our own food. We did eat out once a day though, after all, it is vacation! We spent a day at Hunting Island (biked around the island-15.5 miles) a 'natural', island with a pretty lighthouse, a day in Bluffton (10.5 mile residential ride) and Port Royal, a day in Charleston(Patriot’s Point and Ft. Sumter-photo of USS Yorktown and the tour boat to the Fort) , and one day we just rode bikes near the campground (9 miles). We fished some, and Skyguy skunked me by catch
ing a nice sized catfish. I wish I could have fished more, but the mosquitoes and ticks were horrific. At night, we relaxed in the campground’s hot tub and went to bed early.
We saw quite a few animals that we don’t see at home. On the first day, while riding our bikes along the lakeside(in the picture-the lake is actually much, much larger than the image suggests), we spooked a small 4 foot alligator as he sunned on the bank and he made a huge splash as he lept for the safety of the water. Fishing in a lake with alligators is always more exciting than fishing in a lake where there are only turtles for reptilian
representation.
On the boat ride to Ft. Sumter, we saw quite a few dolphins coming in the feed at high tide and one was positively huge-maybe 10 or 11 feet long. He/She came within 15 feet of the boat so I was able to get a good, however brief, look at him. Later that day while dining in a restaurant on the intracoastal waterway, we saw a family group with a young 3 foot long dolphin racing around at play. It reminded me of the way kids run ahead of their parents at an amusement park, then Mom reins them in, then they run ahead again, etc. It was fun to watch-great food and great entertainment. In Beaufort, we saw an osprey nest, and she was rearing young. We stopped on the roadside, took some pictures(click on the image for a better view), and I could hear the chicks calling, much in the same way that our resident red shouldered hawk chicks chatter. While on the fishing pier at Hunting Island, an old woman caught a small shark, and that got everyone excited, especially the kids on the pier. In Bluffton, while riding bikes along the roadside, I was fighting the wind in the lead position. I had my head down concentrating on a cadence to maintain speed. A nearby noise startled me(I later learned from Skyguy that it was a Canada Goose) and I looked up to see a positively huge snake at the edge of the road just ahead of me. I swerved, but words failed me. Luckily, he saw the snake, too. It was a dead king snake, but it had to have just eaten the largest eastern diamondba
ck on the coast because that was the largest king snake I've ever seen. I did not even know that they got that large, and even though I clearly saw the yellow markings on the snake, my brain just would not register that it was a king snake due to its size. I swear it was the size of my arm, but Skyguy says it wasn’t quite that large. Of course, we saw gulls, Brown Pelicans and other shore birds, too. I never realized this until we got home and I looked it up, but we don’t have Black Vultures here, only Turkey Vultures.
and after Skyguy’s cancer diagnosis, we promised ourselves that we would start taking vacations as soon as the hospital bills were paid. You gotta live life and not work ALL the time. We’ve spent the last 4 days soaking up South Carolina’s Lowcountry culture and riding bikes. We camped at a KOA to keep costs down, and we took a lot of our own food. We did eat out once a day though, after all, it is vacation! We spent a day at Hunting Island (biked around the island-15.5 miles) a 'natural', island with a pretty lighthouse, a day in Bluffton (10.5 mile residential ride) and Port Royal, a day in Charleston(Patriot’s Point and Ft. Sumter-photo of USS Yorktown and the tour boat to the Fort) , and one day we just rode bikes near the campground (9 miles). We fished some, and Skyguy skunked me by catch
ing a nice sized catfish. I wish I could have fished more, but the mosquitoes and ticks were horrific. At night, we relaxed in the campground’s hot tub and went to bed early.
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