Myrtle Beach: Wednesday

On Wednesday morning, Chris was working so I took the children to the Heritage Shores Nature Preserve in the nearby Cherry Beach district. 

The nature walk is only one mile long, but that occupied us for more than an hour because there was so much for young children to see, and it wasn't overly long to tire them out or their pregnant mama (who was pushing a stroller, sometimes through sand).

Beds of oysters

There were approximately a zillion little holes along the path, and each hole was surrounded by something resembling little balls of chewed-up dirt. We were quite perplexed at this mystery until our eyes adjusted to the approximately zillion minuscule crabs running around and darting into said holes.

Crab holes

SO MANY CRABS . . .

. . . all ready to be captured!

Ultimately, I had to put a stop to the capturing of crabs because (1) I was worried the children would damage one of them (thus depleting the population of gajillion crabs in one square mile) and (2) my charmed mommy patience really did run out when we couldn't walk but another foot without having to stop and pick up a new crab friend.

A prior visitor's message out of shells

A heron?

Flying bird

More oysters

We did not see the various mammals that inhabit the nature preserve, such as deer or raccoons, nor the skinks, and we missed entirely the bottle nosed dolphins who sometimes interact in a friendly way with local pedestrians.

Overall, it was a really lovely nature walk, and free, so I highly recommend it.

We came back to the condo for lunch, naps, piano practice, and CCE memory work. Throughout the course of the day, Chris took short breaks to take various children in ones and twos to the pool or the beach, so ultimately they each got a turn.

We had cancelled our afternoon plans to take a three-hour boat tour of inland waterways and the ocean because of severe weather warnings spinning off from the tornado warnings that are all over the Southeast. I was perturbed, though, as the bad weather was delayed by hours and we just holed up in the condo while everything was fine.

Then we went out to dinner just as an alarming, coastal storm began hitting us, and even caused the power to go out during our meal. The overnight was predicted to be one of severe thunderstorms and big winds all night.

Metal that got caught under our van

On Thursday morning, we hit the road and our only snafu was when we ran over a four-foot long piece of stiff, bent metal, which then wrapped itself around our axle. We pulled over and our heroic ten-year-old crawled under the van to extract it so that we could continue on our merry way.

Home, sweet home!