Myrtle Beach Trip: DAY 2 - Fort Sumter

We started our second morning with another walk on the beach! We saw many of the same gulls and sandpipers that we saw the day before. North Myrtle was still wall to sea umbrellas but on our portion of beach, Rick and I met 6 people in the hour and half we walked the sand!

Brown Pelican - these guys, just off the threatened list, are the only non-white pelicans in the world!

Laughing Gull (juv)

Ring billed gull (juv)

Papa convinced us over steaks the night before that a trip to South Carolina wasn't complete with a day in Charleston, so after our beach walk we jumped in the car to head down the coast. Our "tourist site" of interest was Fort Sumter, where the civil war started.

Snowy Egret, these pretty little birds sport black legs and bright yellow feet, which makes them easy to identify, they're sometimes known as "the birds with the golden slippers"

USS YORKTOWN - our ferry docked right next to this enormous aircraft carrier, but we did not tour the boat itself

The engineers at Fort Sumter mixed sea shells into the mortar used inside the columns

Ricky investigates a huge canon at Fort Sumter!

The flags at Fort Sumter. 

Each of these flag has flown over the fort at one point or another.
The highest flag is our current US flag,
the dark flag exactly opposite that is the South Carolina state flag,
the flag with 2 red and 1 white bar is the first confederate flag, the "stars and bars"
the mostly white flag is the second confederate flag,
the flag furthest back is the 33 star flag of the union,
the flag in the front is the 35 star flag of the union (addition of Kansas and West Virginia during the civil war)

Our ferry and the ruins of the Fort Sumter wall

West Indian Buckeye - these were fluttering ALL over the fort!

A map showing the locations of the forts in the Charleston Harbor during the civil war. The first shot of the civil war was fired from Fort Johnson at Fort Sumter (union occupied).

The effects of the war on Fort Sumter

A model of Fort Sumter 

This gorgeous Osprey had a fish and was eating while the crows below kept hopping up to try and steal a bite from him. 

Yellow-crowned Night Heron

After Fort Sumter, Rick and I were pretty done with crowds, so we wandered up the road to the Francis Marion National Forest. We were hoping to find some Red Cockaded Woodpeckers: endangered status, but no luck. Instead we found clouds of enormous mosquitos.

We also found the dock for the Bull Island Ferry (we visited the island Thursday)

Great Blue Heron

Great Blue Heron - this guy did not care that I walked up to take his picture

Our first Alligator in South Carolina, spotted at the Bull Island Ferry pier!

A great white egret flies over the estuary

cliff swallows gather on a phone line

the oak trees down south are MASSIVE and covered in gorgeous spanish moss!

We wandered back to Myrtle Beach, Papa was at his monthly poker game at a friends house, so we wandered up to Barefoot Landing (a shopping center/ boardwalk in North Myrtle) to do a little souvenir shopping and grabbed some supper at Joe's Crab Shack before calling it a night. 

Myrtle Beach Trip: DAY 1

We got up, had coffee with Papa, and headed down to explore the Beach! Our stretch of beach is on a Private Access and the river between us and North Myrtle keeps most of that crowd off it, and all the hotels and public access for Myrtle is miles down the coast so even on a Sunday we only had to share the beach with about 50 people. We saw new gulls, lizards, crabs and LOTS of seashells while we adjusted to the intense humidity that is South Carolina in August. 

Carolina Wren (Briarcliff Acres)

Eastern Bluebird (Briarcliff Acres)

Dragonfly

dragonfly

Ring-billed Gull (juv)

Laughing Gull

Ruddy Turnstone

Ring billed Gull

Sanderling

Six-lined Racerunner (f)

Six-lined Racerunner (juv)

Six-lined Racerunner (m)

Yellow legged gull OR Lesser Black Backed Gull (the two are almost indistinguishable without extended observation)

Royal Tern

Sandwich Tern (LOVE this guys name!)

Willet

Willet

After lunch we went to scope out an Important Birding Area (IBA) according to the South Carolina Audubon Society called Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve. There’s only one public access (poorly marked) and the only things we found there were a lot of high voltage power lines and a power station for a neighboring development. We were hugely disappointed, so headed a little further south on Hwy17  to Huntington Beach State Park. 

We were STUNNED by the shorebirds! 

Anhinga (f) swallowing a fish!

huge colorful spider

Anhinga (m) - Male Anhinga have dark necks and heads, while females have pale, buffy colored necks

Anhinga (m)

Great Egret

Little Blue Heron

Roseate Spoonbill and Wood Storks (both threatened birds, the spoonbill is very rare in SC - too far north)

Snowy Egret

Spotted Sandpiper

Tri-colored heron

Tri-colored heron in flight

White Ibis (adult-white, juvenile-brown)

White Ibis

Wood Stork

After our walk around Huntington we headed home to grill some Telsrow grown T-bones! Papa bragged about them to his poker buddies the next evening.

Myrtle Beach Trip: THE DRIVE

Saturday Aug 3

Departure: 5:10am (CST)

Arrival: 1:30am (EST)

Total Driving Time: 19 hours, 20 minutes

Total Driving Time according to Google Map: 17 hours 24 minutes

Reason for huge time discrepancy: Kentucky

After leaving Iowa We took I-74 into Peoria for a while and then headed south towards Memphis on I-57 all the way down Illinois, it was all fairly smooth sailing until we turned onto I-24 towards Nashville and entered the Lost State of Kentucky. 

Kentucky has lost a lot of things apparently, it’s road construction crews for one thing, turn signals were another thing - people just cut across three lanes of traffic and veer in and out of traffic so they can get to that off-ramp doing 70mph, NOT that we did 70 very often in Kentucky. No, instead, we did about 30. 

Unless we were completely stopped. 

We spent a lot of time just SITTING in Kentucky, 

Not because construction crews were busy working, not because there was a flagger or some legitimate reason to be stopped on the interstate.

No, we were stopped because there were orange cones.

Nothing was happening with the orange cones. 

They were just there. 

Hanging out. 

Randomly stealing a lane from traffic and making an entire state of people who’ve lost the ability to use a turn signal, merge. 

We picked up speed once we passed into Tennesee and took I-40 to Knoxville and then into North Carolina where we picked up I-26 to Columbia and then scooted across South Carolina on 51.

South Carolina we’ve learned, is a very DARK state. There are no street lights on the highways. 

NONE

That moon on the state flag apparently means you have to drive by the light of it, because you never get to use your brights (too much oncoming traffic) and the ONLY illumination you get are your headlights. Rick and I had to take turns because we both felt we were going blind squinting into the darkness to look for turns we knew had to be there but couldn’t see ahead of time. 

But, finally, we reached Myrtle Beach.

Papa had long since gone to bed but left the door open and the light on for us. 

We took showers (because something about being in the car that long just makes you feel GREASY) and crashed.