My Vacation Report

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I just know you all have been waiting for my vacation slide show, like the good friends you are. So, here I am on Sunday morning, looking over my pictures and thinking about what a nice vacation it was. It was so nice in fact, that I'm having a difficult time getting back into real time. I'm still moving at granny speed.

We were on the southern coast of South Carolina on Fripp Island, which is about halfway between Hilton Head and Charleston, just east of Beaufort.

We spent two days driving down -- it's a 12 hour trip in all. We arrived on Sunday, stopped at the grocer and then headed to the island. It's kind of a remote island -- there isn't really access to restaurants and stores once you get there, and any kind of access is 45 minutes away. We stayed in a house, and used a golf cart to tool around the island.

We had a wonderful five days and the highlights are (and I'll let you decide which are the good and which are the bad):




Driving: You just haven't lived until you've driven I-77 through the West Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains in a rented 12-passenger van with a cranky 19-year-old, a crabby 7 year-old, and people who get car sick, including one of the two in the way-back seat and my mother. The Blue Ridge Mountains are very pretty I just can't figure out why they can't make the roads straight. ;-)




The beach: I could never, ever get tired of the beach. I told College Boy that sitting at the edge of the ocean with a good book, feet dipped in the tide, is one of my Top Five Favorite Things ever. I could sit there until my skin shriveled up from the water, sun and wind. Fripp has 3-plus miles of uninterrupted beach -- soft sand and warm water. It was not crowded at all (as you can see by the empty stretch in the picture below), and the people who were there were nice and most of the under-five crowd was very cute.

Boys never grow up, do they?

Boogie girl.

The creature from the black lagoon.

A VIP tour of the Marine Corps Air Station and Parris Island: my brother, a former Marine Corp major, arranged for us to visit with a colleague at the MCAS in Beaufort. We saw a demonstration of their canine police, very cool, and then got a tour of the air station and Parris Island, also very cool (except actually very hot and very buggy -- those poor recruits). The boys thought it was awesome and Peach got a mini-MP badge to keep. And the gunnery sergeant who showed us around Parris Island earned his "pink stripe" with Peach in the back seat of his vehicle for 25 minutes!





Beaufort National Cemetery: no commentary needed. It was beautiful and peaceful, if there is such a thing -- an ideal resting place. We saw graves dating all the way back to the Civil War.




The state bird of South Carolina: the mosquito. Take your Deep Woods Off and some Benadryl spray if you ever visit. I didn't get a shot of any mosquitos, but college boy got a picture of this giant spider. Eewwww!




The food: I'm afraid I have no pictures of food, but I will tell you that low country food is really one of our country's best culinary treats. I bought shrimp for $3.50 a pound. The fish market sold what came in on their own boats the day before. In fact, the boats were parked 10 feet from the back door in the waterway. Awesome stuff. If you live in low country, I truly envy you your seafood. I copied some recipes from a low country cookbook that was at the house, but I'm afraid the availability of fresh seafood in Ohio will make it difficult to copy anything I could make there.




Jellyfish: Noah was stung the second evening we were there. It happened about 30 seconds after I took this picture. That's him on the left. It hurt pretty badly, but we treated it with vinegar and Benadryl and, trooper that he was, he went back in the next day. A couple other kids were stung while we were there, but fortunately none of my kids got wigged out worrying about them.





The deer -- Fripp Island is overrun with deer. They have no predators, are in no way threatened by man or beast, so they are basically like wild pets. One evening at dinner time there were eight deer in the back of the house. The kids went out to feed them (which we were not supposed to do, but the deer expect it) and I got a lot of pictures. Yes, they were eating out of their hands and Peach was petting them. She thought she was a Disney princess.






Well, if you have stuck with me this long, you are a dear (not a deer). I hope that you have enjoyed our vacation even just a fraction of what we did. We aim to stay in the good graces of our hosts and hopefully be invited back again.


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