After three full days in the sun on the beach, it was time to see what else the area around Myrtle Beach had to offer. We quickly discovered that we all loved the little village of Murrell's Inlet. There is a line of restaurants right on the marsh, and they host live music every evening. Denisa was a happy camper because she got to do some dancing on the marsh walk with all that music. We were here three different times before we got a picture in the day light along the marsh walk.
Right across the marsh is Goat Island--named for obvious reasons. Actually, these goats spend the winter on a farm in the area, and just vacation for the summer on Goat Island.
For a taste of southern charm and history, we headed to Hopsewee Plantation for a tour. Built in 1740, this house has withstood the test of time. One of its secrets of longevity is that its solid black cypress wood siding was put together without nails. It was built for Thomas Lynch, Sr., a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was supposed to sign the Declaration of Independence, but a cerebral hemorrhage made him physically unable to sign. If you check a copy of the Declaration of Independence, it has a blank line at the bottom for his signature. His son, Thomas Lynch, Jr. would sign in his Father's absence, but on a different line.
Hopsewee's location is the other reason it is still standing 276 years after it was built. It was so far off the beaten path that the Union Army didn't take the time to torch it when making its march across South Carolina. We had a great tour, led by a woman that lived here as a child. She knew the history of all the past owners, as well as interesting stories that happened while her family resided here.
We drove here today, but the easiest mode of transportation in the 1800's was to arrive via boat on the Santee River.
There were no pictures allowed inside the house, but we could photograph interesting things in the yard. This interesting thing is a joggling board. It is a long springy plank resting on two supports. By bouncing up and down, it was a physical therapy tool to give exercise to people with muscular ailments. Our two medical professionals were getting their exercise joggling this morning.
Our next stop was the historic town of Georgetown, with its Harborwalk along the river. We got a rain shower this morning, so it was a good day to be hanging out at historic sites instead of the beach.
After so many pictures of just Mark and Denisa over the last year, it's nice to have some with Luke as well.
Another day, we spent time exploring the area to our north. We crossed the state line into North Carolina, and enjoyed some time at La Belle Amie vineyards. It was a beautiful location with the grape vines leafed out and weighing heavy on the wooden supports.
The grapes are a good size now, and they'll be used to make the vineyard's label "Twisted Sisters" wines. We had good timing with our visit here, as live music and a lunch grill started about the time we got seated in their outdoor pavilion area. There would be limited dancing, however, because Mark managed to injure his shoulder playing football on the beach the day before. (Mark is finding that trying to keep up with his sons on the beach has now caused more than one injury.)
We also stopped by Huntington Beach State Park. Since we are staying at the state park down the road, admission was free to this park. But a big rain cloud chased us out of the park before we had time to take a tour of the ruins of its mansion named "Atalaya."
We also did some exploring of the many shopping venues around Myrtle Beach. We checked out The Market Commons, Broadway at the Beach, and Barefoot Landing. We don't have room in the motor home for new purchases, except those that can be consumed. Denisa is having a good time putting together her consumable bag of candy. You could say that she was as happy as a kid in a candy store.
Another name for the southern section of this South Carolina beach area is the "Hammock Coast." So it is fitting that there is a Hammock Shopping Village that actually specializes in hand-made hammocks. We watched as one of the guys wove his way across the loom.
Mark eats ice cream every day, and he has obviously passed his ice cream genes on to his children. We went out for ice cream every evening except one--and that would be the evening we made home-made ice cream at the beach house. No ice cream pictures, but Denisa did take a picture of the cute ducklings crossing the bridge close to one of the ice cream stores.
Besides eating ice cream, we also played games most evenings. We have always played games with our sons, so it is fun that Jordan's family also loves to play.
It's been a great week of good family time. We love our daughter-in-law and her family, and we have truly been blessed with getting to spend this vacation time with them. But everyone has jobs to get home to, leaving Mark and Denisa to wander His wonders alone once again.
We headed east in the motor home this year because our oldest son and his wife wanted to meet us at a beach on the east coast. He is finishing his first year of residency in pediatrics in Kansas City, and has a rare week off. We haven't seen Luke and Jordan since Christmas, so we were excited that they wanted to spend this precious time off with their families.
Besides Luke and Jordan, we also get to spend the week with Jordan's parents and her brother, Conner. They all flew in together, and we thought it was interesting that both of the fathers were dressed alike.
Just to introduce the cast of characters for this week, we've included the following picture. Thanks Claire, for taking the picture of the two families that were joined when our children got married a year and a half ago. On the left side of the couch is Jordan's family with her Mother (Lisa), Father (Matt), and brother (Conner). On the right is Denisa and Mark with our two sons, Luke and Blake.
Our children really enjoy each other, and they were already wading in the surf minutes after they arrived.
We spent the next two days playing on the beaches around Myrtle Beach. This area is called "The Grand Strand," and we had a grand time here. Our first day was spent at Surfside Beach, just down the street from the beach house they had rented for the week. We had an arsenal of toys for playing in the water, including four boogie boards for shooting the waves.
Denisa loved riding these boards, and they had a hard time getting her out of the water.
We also had a beach football, but there are no pictures of the football games. We were all too busy designing fancy passing plays to think about getting out cameras. But the favorite beach game of all was spike ball. Luke and Jordan brought it on the plane in one of their carry-on bags, and we used it a lot.
The goal is for you and your partner to spike that little yellow ball into the net in such a way that the other team can't return it. We had many people stop by to watch this unusual game. We had different combinations of partners, and it was fun to play a game with Denisa and Luke vs. Mark and Blake. We played two-on-two games of all types for all those years that the boys were growing up, and it was fun reliving some of those sweet memories. Matt and Mark played the champions (Luke and Jordan) over and over until they finally won.
There's lots of jumping and running in the sand in this game, and Mark discovered that this kind of friction can cause a large blood blister to develop on the bottom of a foot.
Our second beach day was at Pawley's Island. South of Myrtle Beach, we crossed over the causeway to get to this little island that is separated from the mainland by a river. Pawley's Island was once a summer retreat for wealthy plantation owners that used it to get away from the malaria-carrying mosquitoes around their in-land rice fields. We tried for a group picture at this beach, but only got seven of us in the picture.
That's because Jordan and Claire were already taking twinkie pictures together. With their black swim suits and floppy hats, it was hard to tell them apart when we played football on the beach and they were on opposite teams.
The new toy of the day was a skimmer board. This is Blake trying his maiden voyage on the new slippery board.
The goal is to throw the board out onto the shallow layer of water as the tide is receding. Then you must run and catch it in order to plant your feet on it for a ride as it skims across the water. If the water gets too shallow, the board comes to a quick stop in the sand. That leads to an even quicker dismount.
There probably should be a warning label on a skimmer board, limiting its use to people under 50 years of age. Just guessing that Mark probably wouldn't have heeded that warning, as he definitely tried the skimmer board too.
Another day we headed north and across the state line to experience a North Carolina Beach. We also wanted to go to the town of Calabash, North Carolina. Since we have been in this area, we have consistently seen restaurant menus with listings for "Calabash Sea Food." We found that this little town in North Carolina is the founder of a special combination of seasonings and light breading technique that has grown to be wildly popular. We ate a great meal in Calabash, and spent some time on the beach as well.
We had lots of fun playing in the water and on the beaches of the Grand Strand. We went to five different beaches while we were staying in the Myrtle Beach area, but our over-all favorite was . . .
Pawley's Island has no high rise hotels. The number of people on the beach is limited to the residents of the sparsely spaced beach houses and a small parking lot at the south end of the island. We were lucky enough to snag one of those limited parking spots both of the times we visited Pawley's. Also, there were enough sea shells on the beach to spell out the name of our new favorite beach.
But most of all, it was so good to have the whole family together. Blake and Claire had to return to Oklahoma too soon, but we were so pleased that they went to the expense and trouble to spend this time with us too. We have been grandly blessed on the Grand Strand!
After our two week stay in North Carolina, we rolled back across the state line into South Carolina once again. This was one of our longest driving days since we started this full-time adventure. We usually move just one or two hours down the road, but this day our destination was over four hours away. We are driving this far because we have special visitors to pick up at the airport, with more special visitors coming.
We made our reservations at Myrtle Beach State Park many months ago, as this is a very popular place to be during the summer months. We were a little underwhelmed with our camping site, tucked in the woods with over 300 other sites. It took some very skilled driving to get our big motor home down the single lane roads crowded with bicycling children and people carrying all their beach gear.
We were especially underwhelmed to find out that one of our shade trees was a messy mulberry, with berries littered all over our site. We knew that mulberries are notorious for staining carpet and furniture, so Mark swept the area with a dried palmetto branch. Denisa came to like that tree much better when she realized that it was also a natural bird feeder. The cardinals and blue jays frequented our camp site often to nibble on these fruity treats.
As soon as we had the motor home settled into its spot, we headed down to the beach. It's an easy walk through a crowded campground to get to the wide expanse of sand. But we were sad to see that there were almost no shells on the beach.
At our state park we are removed from the hustle and bustle of the high rise section of Myrtle Beach, but we could see it up close when we walked a couple miles north.
We walked down to the pier for a picture showing the long expanse of wood supports that hold it up against the force of the waves.
We were surprised to see several young guys intently digging in the sand for something. When we asked what they were finding, they were happy to show us their catch. These are sand fleas, and they will use them for fish bait. We had heard of sand fleas before, but we envisioned them to be the size of dog fleas. We were a little horrified at their size, and we found out that they can leave giant red welts when they bite humans.
We actually arrived a day earlier to Myrtle Beach than planned because we had special guests to pick up at the airport. The good news is the airport is very close to the state park. The bad news is that we can hear those big jets as they take off and land right over our heads.
It was just 2.6 miles from our park to the the Myrtle Beach airport to pick up our youngest son, Blake and his girl friend, Claire. This is the easiest airport shuttle ever! They were wearing matching t-shirts with eagles on them. They were humming the song from the Space Jam soundtrack, "I want to to fly like an eagle, to the sea" in anticipation of their flight to the ocean.
We picked them up from a 10:38 p.m. flight, and it was close to midnight by the time we got back to the state park. They didn't want to wait until the next morning to get their feet in the sand, so we headed to the beach for a night-time stroll.
The next morning we were back to the beach again. But this time we headed up the highway to North Myrtle Beach for our first day. You can see that the beach is deep with lots of good sand for walking, but we spent most of the day playing in the waves. After going to different water parks throughout the years, we have determined that God made the best wave pool ever!
They brought a ball, so we played some volleyball on the beach. We have found that Denisa is a better player without that darn net in her way.
Now that we have seen the midnight beach, and the afternoon beach, we only had one more beach time on our list. So we woke up the next morning at 5:30 a.m. to get the sun rise beach.
Blake and Mark weren't sure if they wanted to wake up so early for our sun rise adventure. It was barely light enough to see to take the short walk from our camp site to the beach. But right on time, the sun peeked over the pier. You can tell that Denisa and Claire were more excited about this sunrise walk. You can see the two females walking far up the beach to greet the sun while Mark and Blake are dragging their feet far behind us.
By 6:10 a.m. the sun was rising quickly into the sky over the Atlantic. We stayed on the beach for a few minutes, wandering His wonders for a few more minutes.
Then we made the short walk back to the motor home, where it didn't take us long to get back to sleep. This is the first time we have made two extra beds in our motor home, but we are glad to see that we can use the couch for one bed, and the sofa bed air mattress for another. We are using every inch of the motor home! The four of us are having a great time at the beach, but we are excited that we have even more family coming for more fun!
One steamy afternoon when we returned to the motor home from exploring outside, we flipped on the air-conditioner like usual. It's not a good thing when you are greeted by a loud grinding noise from one of the roof-top air conditioners when temperatures are forecast in the 90's. It's an especially horrifying sound when you have visitors coming that have flown half-way across the country to spend time with you.
We have two air conditioners on the motor home, and we were relieved that our back AC was still functioning correctly. We were also glad that we had booked shady camping sites.
It's times like this that we feel that the extended warranty we purchased is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that when there are big things that go wrong with the motor home, we know that we are limited to our $50 deductible and the cost of shipping parts to our location.
The curse is that our extended warranty company requires that the diagnosis of the problem, and the repair is done by the same repair service. Between the diagnosis and repair, the warranty company must approve the cost, and parts must be shipped. So any repairs will require that we are in the same location for a week or more. That wouldn't happen until we reached Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
But we couldn't walk on the beach until we checked on the air conditioner problem. So Mark made an appointment to be at "Camper Connection" repair service when we rolled into town. Denisa took a picture of the technician climbing down from the roof.
By this time Mark had trouble-shot the problem and knew that the compressor and air unit were fine. Our problem was the blower unit that was supposed to bring that cool air into the motor home. He had already called the Coleman company that made the unit, and he knew what part we would need and how to get it. He even knew the name of the Coleman representative to call, because he had offered to ship the part for free and pay for its installation. Mark was on top of the motor home with the technician, and was the one that found the crack in the hamster-wheel blower fan that was spreading apart and causing the racket.
So Mark obviously knew more than the repair service. But our extended warranty requires us to go through a service company to certify that something is actually broken and that they can fix it properly.
In the meantime, Mark gets the great idea that he can fix the broken part that has cracked and is causing the racket. So he uses a zip tie to hold the cracked section of the wheel together.
One of the things Denisa loves about Mark is his keen ability to fix things, and this was one of his best fixes ever! We now had both air conditioners while our visitors were with us in Myrtle Beach!
Fast forward a week, and we are still waiting to hear from our service company. We also got other bad news. The Coleman representative Mark spoke with is on vacation for the week, and no one there knows that he has authorized to pay for our repairs. Our extended warranty company will only pay $80/hour while Camping Connection wants to charge $125/hour for the repair. The only good news is that Coleman did ship out the part we need, and they didn't charge us any shipping charges.
So after waiting a week, Mark picked up the free part, and did the installation himself. We also had to pay the $62.50 diagnosis fee to the service company, even though Mark was the one that had to show the technician what was wrong with the air conditioner.
From talking to the Coleman technician, Mark found out that they have improved the condenser fan on the air-conditioner. The six-blade fan has been replaced by a three-blade fan that is quieter while the unit is running. Coleman shipped this part as well, and Mark installed it while he was on the roof top. This is a picture of the old (and louder) six-blade fan that he replaced.
To summarize a long blog story, we can't recommend the Camping Connection RV repair service in Myrtle Beach. But the good news is that we once again have two working air-conditioners. The best news is that Denisa thinks Mark is awesome!
