Brookgreen Gardens

While we were visiting my parents we went to Brookgreen Gardens. It's currently a nature preserve, but in the past it was a rice plantation and then someone's home and surrounding gardens. The preserve includes numerous statue gardens, rivers, and a zoo of local animals. Get ready for a ton of pictures. 

Some of the statues and gardens we saw while walking to the boat docks.

 Spanish moss covered trees.

Since there is a lot of history surrounding the area, there is a boat tour that takes you up the river through the area that used to be the rice plantations.While waiting for the boat, we saw a baby alligator hanging out by the docks.

 The wooden structure in the picture is a trunk. They were used to flood and drain the rice patties.

 An alligator swimming across the river in front of the boat.

 After the boat tour we walked over to the zoo area.

 Justin inside the bird enclosure. All the animals they have are native to the area.

 Super adorable otters.

 All the foxes were passed out since it was the middle of the day.

 All these birds of prey were rescued from some sort of cruelty or another.

 Something new at the gardens was the butterfly house.

 After the animals, we went back to the other side of the preserve to walk through the gardens. Here's only a few samples of the pictures I took. I'm sure no one wants to look at 800 statues. A quick note: Justin's favorite was Diana the huntress (below) and there were probably 12 different Diana statues so I had to take a picture of each one for him.

 

 The fountain of the muses.

 One area had some sort of plant surrounding a fountain that these little frogs like to hang out on. We saw 5 or 6 little froggies.

 I'm not sure exactly why, but the tree branches grow down towards the ground on some of these trees.

Murrells Inlet, SC

Last week we went to visit my parents at their new house in South Carolina. They retired over a year ago and moved to the beach.


Their house is a 10 minute drive to the beach so we went every day. Mainly we walked and looked for shells. I'm not super into laying out or swimming so we didn't hang out at the beach all day. The beach they go to is actually a state park, so it's really clean and not super crowded. At one point you drive over a land bridge with salt water on one side (that rises and falls with the tides) and fresh water on the other side (with alligators!).

One of the little islands with some gators.


The beach.







Every day we would walk down to the jetty and back, which was about 2.5 miles round trip. It felt really nice to wake up and walk on the beach.

Great Falls has hardly anything in the way of shopping so we hit up the outlet malls one afternoon when it was rainy. I got a $95 Columbia jacket for 15 bucks, it was pretty awesome.

We also went down to the boardwalk in Murrells Inlet. It has a bunch of shops and restaurants along the water.







Across from the boardwalk is this island that randomly has goats living on it.


One day driving home we saw this USA shaped hole in the clouds.


On the last day we went up to Broadway at the Beach because it's Justin's favorite place at Myrtle Beach.





And here's the new giant ferris wheel down by the beach, with its air conditioned capsules.



While we were there we also went to Brookgreen Gardens but I'll save that for another post because I took way too many pictures.