The Southern Experience - A Visit to Hilton Head


I've been enjoying travel this year - Cuba, France, NY and most recently, South Carolina and Georgia.  Each trip has been so very different but this was a getaway jam packed with my sisters and friends and we lucked out on a magnificent week weather-wise and lots of cool adventures.


We were celebrating sister Liz's 60th and just happened to luck out on an opportunity to stay at a condo, for a very reasonable price, which was located a few short miles from where her dear friend, Linda, has a beautiful retirement home.  Linda is president of the Sea Turtles Patrol in Hilton Head so we got quite an environmental education while there. I even saved a turtle - albeit the pond type.

We toured Daufuskie Island which was quite a treat - an island you can only get to by a private ferry boat, which is 5 miles long and 2.5 miles wide and is steeped with history and charm. Folks get around on unpaved roads with golf carts and everyone seems to know everyone else. Quiet, laid back and beautiful, Daufuskie has an intriguing history as well as a handful of artisans who embrace the lifestyle and share their crafts.

Metal sculptor Chase Allen of Iron Fish Gallery offers metal fish, turtles, mermaids, crabs and other artsy objects at a unique outdoor gallery with an honor system payment plan. 



Daufuskie Blues which is housed in the historical Mayfield's School is a place  where you can learn about  how indigo was a plantation crop here years ago. While here you can also grab a delicious treat at School Grounds Coffee, housed in the same building.

We also biked, swam, dines, went out on a sunset cruise and a pontoon boat but I think our favorite trip was on Captain Amber Kuehn's Marine Education tour on her boat, Spartina.  Captain Amber's enthusiasm for her salt marsh estuary home and sharing the living things within it was absolutely contagious.




She shared the importance of the green grasses (called Spartina) that make up the marsh and explained that there is more of that particular grass in South Carolina than anywhere else in the world.  She talked about the need for natural filtration and that sometimes the smell that tourists complain of is the earth and the waters doing what they need to to keep aquatic life healthy.



Captain Amber showed a passion for the world around her - something I believe we all need to embrace and realize how fragile this ecosytem is and how much we are taking it for granted.

She offers a short video clip on her website and concludes with: "As the sun sets on the marsh, it's like a finale of a performance that went on all day long and we are so privileged to be in the audience."

Our trip was more than just fun - it was eye opening and thought provoking...I guess that's why I enjoy travel so much.  I hope my readers embrace travel and enjoy my photography,  Please leave me a comment below if you do.

Meanwhile, keep on embracing your lives and doing what you can to realize this is a great big wonderful world that we live in and we need to appreciate it, help protect it and share the good in it.

Thanks for stopping by.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day Trip with my Daughter

Image
Between Covid 19 and moving from Texas to Maryland, I really haven't seen much of the world this year and that is hard on this travel-loving girl.  Here I am living an hour away from Baltimore and Washington, DC and we are stuck in an unending state of quarantine.  I needed to break out so I asked my daughter if she'd take an early morning trip to Annapolis with me. "How early?" she wanted to know. She is not normally a photographer and, with two young children, unaccustomed to our "pre-dawn" starts.  "As early as you can," I tried and she and the kids showed up slightly after 7 am.  Popsie stayed with the kids who grumbled that they just wanted to go back to sleep, but Nova was game for a new adventure and we happily drove 35 minute southeast to the beautiful city of Annapolis.  Court house showed some signs of life. Mask covered guards stood at the door. Maryland's capital city, located on the Chesapeake Bay is a lovely, his...
Read more

Visiting Switzerland - Zurich

Image
My husband and I recently had the opportunity to join a group of photographers, led by Joe Brady and his wife, Diane Bollen , to visit five different cities in Switzerland - Zurich, St. Moritz, Zermatt, Grindelwald and Lucern.  Despite never hearing of these places before now, we had such an enjoyable trip that I want to share this experience with you. I plan to write 5 blogs, one for each city, to show some of the beauty we encountered and remember this wonderful trip. We arrived in Zurich very early on a Saturday morning in June. We chose to go straight to sleep in an airport hotel, to ward off jet lag. When we woke in early afternoon, we were right near the trains which were in a giant "mall" building with all kinds of shops. We asked which stop we needed to get off, and proceeded to navigate the train system to see some of Zurich's sites.  The streets were festive with vendors and people shopping.  After walking around and trying to figure out where we needed to meet...
Read more

Doing my best to capture Austin's weirdness

Image
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. I discovered an awesome PhotoWalk yesterday thanks to Photographers Adventure Group and Trover . The concept of Trover was brand new to me - it's a phone app that helps you share life's hidden gems, through photography, with others, and it is evidently very popular in other places in the world and is becoming a hit around here. So, the walk encouraged me to use my iphone as a camera way more than I would normally use it. That didn't stop me from taking close to 300 images with my camera - but it did open my eyes to the social networking capabilities of iphone photography and one of my fellow walkers also showed me some outrageous editing capabilites it has as well. We were instructed to upload our photos as we took them, giving a bit of a description and posting them to the Trover site. This was a technological challenge for me, but I love a good challenge and, at the end of the day I actually won a pretty cool p...
Read more