Lost III: Hunting Island State Park

On Tuesday of the Best Vacation All I Ever Wanted Ever, we suntan lotioned up and headed over for a walk around Hunting Island State Park just two miles up the road. "Turn left" the lady said as Ben turned right. We made a u-turn and arrived in good time.

After making our four dollars per person parking payment, we "walked on down the pier. And we came to a door." No, not really, no doors on the pier. There were some lovely marshes along the beach, and we saw several dolphins - or at least their dorsal fins - swimming about the little bay. Here's a collective of pics from the pier:

So we have some empirical evidence there that so long as our path goes 200 yards out to the end of a pier and then 200 yards back to the shore, we can find our way. Yay! Go highly educated folks! Things would not be so simple in the future. We waited outside the park station for Ben to complete his business calls. Got some good shots of CHristophe and Malcolm while we waited - note especially the shot of Christophe taken from atop Malcolm's dome, aka the Mal-cam:

After Ben closed his call with "Sell, bee-otch, sell!!!!", we headed out on what was supposed to be a quick hike along the park's trails. With the emphasis on "quick," many of us did not even bother bringing shoes but opted for tevas (pronounced "teh-vas") instead. Big mistake, as it turns out our lust for lighthouses would be our undoing. And by "our," I mean "Beck's."

Things started out simply enough - we just trounced through the jungled woods along the path. We were eaten by bugs every time we stopped, so we lathered up with OFF lotion and trod fast. It was Apocalypse Now jungly with all kinds of greenery and palm fronds. Check it:

You'll notice in the last pic that the ladies + Malcolm are flying ahead of us. They had some kind of hot date at a lighthouse to get to, it seems. The menfolk lolligagged along at a comfortable pace. I specifically remember talking about podcasts and talk radio as we crossed this bridge:

And we saw a butterfly:

It was about this time that we ran into the beach. Given the choice of turning around and heading back to the cars or turning left and heading toward a lighthouse, we turned... left. Sigh. We should have noted the gloomy sky and headed home, but we were not so smart:

So we walked, and walked, and walked. Got lost, and got a lot of entirely unhelpful information from locals AND THE PARK RANGERS, who tried to send us halfway to the moon or something with their bizarro directions. SO a big BOO-URNS directed towards (some) of the Hunting Island Park Rangers; hella lame you were! On the other hand, our lost-getting provided some fantastic photo opportunities:

That middle one is an absolute classic, and check out Malcolm's expression in the third. Most excellent. Somewhere in here we were passed on the trail by a mysterious race of woodspeople, I call them ewoks. Note the authentic, blurry bigfoot style of this photo I snapped over my shoulder:

Truly scary to an encounter an entirely new species in the wilderness. Anyways, we at some point - again, no thanks to the misleading park ranger in the truck - made it back to our cars, six miles of hiking done and lighthouse unseen. So we drove over to the lighthouse - only we didn't actually visit it, we instead buzzed the tower. WHAT??!? Oh, and guess what, it looked like a lighthouse. Tres exciting. After our long, terrifying adventure, we drove to Sonicamerica and got slushes and ice creams and shakes. What a great way to undo a day of exercising, eh?

So that concludes the recalling of the SC vacation; hope you enjoyed. BBASCM, please let me know if I've left anything out. Until next time, word, and beware of Ewoks in the Gullah-land.