To celebrate our 29th anniversary we took a long weekend trip to Huntington Beach State Park, SC. The forecast was for rain most of the weekend. It rained pretty hard Thursday night but on Friday it was only drizzling at times. We packed as much into the day as we could in case it rained the rest of the weekend. We walked to the beach...
Biked to Merrels Inlet and saw Goat Island. Paul read that some local teens were growing weed on this little island and to get rid of it the guy that owns the bar near the island had a farmer bring in goats to eat it. Now it's the goats' summer home!
Visited the Spanish style "castle" near the beach in the state park. Arthur Huntington (a millionaire) bought the land and built this home to be his and his wife's winter home in the early 1930s. Anna Huntington had tuberculosis.
The gates on the windows were to protect from hurricanes.
The inside is very sparse and stoic. Someone described it as an anti-Biltmore.
Arthur and Anna did alot to help the locals who they hired to build the house and who worked for them.
They had bought up several old rice plantations and when they no longer lived there they turned the property into a state park. Across the road from the park is Brookgreen gardens--a sculpture garden they built. Anna was a famous sculptor.
When the depression hit they bought sculptures from struggling artists to put in the gardens.
Some of the plantations the Huntingtons bought for the Gardens.
We also went out to dinner on Friday night. Paul had seafood macaroni and cheese!
On Saturday it stormed in the morning but by noon it had cleared and was beautiful for the rest of the day.
We got to eat lunch and hang out at the beach for a while.
Then we explored the park some more and saw lots of cool birds. This is a roseate spoonbill. Some of the birdwatchers there told it it was pretty special to see so many.
As
As we were riding back to camp I saw this tail along the side of the road and called Paul back to see.
An
Another couple had just ran to the other side of the road because they had seen it crawling towards the road! We felt sort of safe since it had turned around and was heading back to the water...
To join his friend! There were so many alligators!!! Thankfully we only saw them here and not on the trails or near our campsite.
Sunday morning after online church we went back to Brookgreen Gardens to see what we hadn't had time to see on Friday. The tickets were good for 7 days. We hadn't seen any of Anna's sculptures on Friday so we were glad to see several this day.
When we were at Atalaya the tour guide told us the story of the horse who was the model for Anna's Don Quiote sculpture so we went looking for it.
She had seen the horse in a field and it looked so sick she thought it would make a good model for Don Quiote's horse. She bought it and then only had a few weeks to do the sculpture because when they started feeding it, it started to look healthy and it lived a long time.
She had cages for the live bear models at Atalaya
Arthur Huntington was a poet so there were poems all over the gardens. I took a picture of this one because I remembered it from when the boys were little and memorizing poetry for homeschool.
There's a zoo at the gardens. These were in the butterfly house.
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