There is no research we need to do in South Carolina at the moment, so we are “on vacation”. It’s the week before July 4th and we have no reservations made. It’s getting close enough that it was stressing me out, not having a “spot”, so we sat down with the calendar, and a map. 
We had decided that we’d love to go to the beach for a few days, and figured that Myrtle Beach would be fun, but what are the odds we’d find a spot? Armed with a list of Campgrounds, we call the first one, the one that looked the best, and were shocked to hear that they did indeed have an opening (helps to be in a truck camper!).With that reservation taken care of, we started looking for places to stop along the way.
Facebook makes it somewhat easier to connect with people, and my cousin, who I haven’t spent time with in about 40 years, saw where we were headed, and reached out. We had a great dinner with her and her husband Jimmy at their home in South Carolina.
It isn’t often that we get a chance to visit a National Park that we’ve never been to before but Congaree National Park is in South Carolina.
Congaree is an old growth floodplain forest, one of the few left in this country. As you would think, when it rains, this area, which is bordered by bluffs on both sides, fills with water.
The trees that grow here are capable of surviving in standing water. The Bald Cypress trees surround themselves with a root system called knees. No one is really sure what their purpose is but perhaps they work as a snorkel.
There is one other creature that flourishes in the floodplain forest:
July 2 we arrived at Myrtle Beach. We’ve been here before but we have never stayed here. Our campground has just about everything you could want, and we made good use of it all over the July 4th holiday.
The ocean is what I was excited about- the weather was gorgeous and the water temperature was in the 80s! We could walk to it from our site- priceless!
I spent a lot of time in the water, and it was so warm that even Paul came in pretty often…
We realized the first day that we were ill equipped for a stay at the beach, so we hit up the stores and now own two beach
chairs and an umbrella.
With numerous pool parties, dances and assorted contests, there was plenty to do over the holiday. There was even a parade, right outside our door.
We knew we were in the right spot when people started pulling their chairs up all along our street.
Once the parades, barbequing and dancing was done, we took our chairs and walked to the beach where we could watch all the fireworks that were being set off by the hotels along the waterfront.
We are really spoiled as far as fireworks go, so we just enjoyed the fact that we were watching from a beach, didn’t have to drive, and were wearing shorts and a t-shirts.
