DAY 98 : October 13/22 Thursday. Charleston, SC to Edisto Beach, SC

Awake a lot last night between the loud airplanes and the thunder storm. Up and at 'em around 8am... made breakfast and did some schoolwork from our work books : social studies with Mama... reading about first nations in eastern canada, which was a little easier to relate to since we'd visited and learned about the Wendat first nations during our visit to Quebec City! 

Then it was time to put some of our new stickers on the rig side panel. The kids surprised me with a new Wonder Woman sticker!!! it's awesome. I love it. They got it at the AutoZone with daddy. Pretty fun. Also, lots of airforce jets and planes flying overhead this morning going to the nearby airforce base/airfield. 

10:30am : Next on our agenda was visiting a Spirit Halloween store... a much anticipated outing by the kids, especially Oliver. He has been eager to get a scary mask for his costume. Hoping we get some good ideas there. We drove the 10 minutes to the big Spirit store and had a blast in there looking around at all the fun and scary halloween stuff. Spent almost an hour and a half in there wandering around. Ollie had a good look at the masks but couldn't decide on which one yet. We came away with a mini-Skelly, a white draped ghoul that lights up, a zombie bat, and a voice changer. 

12:30pm we were back on Highway 17 driving through lots of marshland and live oaks with spanish moss to the Highway 174 towards Edisto Beach. Saw a few residences and so many oaks lining the road a little further along. By 1pm we were driving over the bridge to Edisto Island... marshlands galore. (Cue comment by Jonathan about "this kiteboarder, Evan Nesh, has a video of him kiting in these kind of marshlands jumping the marshes!") .... also we saw the Edisto Post office (cue excitement by Kathy, haha)

By 1:20pm we were in our little tropical feeling site #54 at Edisto Beach State Park campground. Met a nice lady with an awesome southern drawl at the front booth with her little poodle "Tide".... she highly recommended the learning centre on Palmetto Road, and looking out for swamp deer. 

Cool campground with crushed shells and white sand as the "gravel"... surrounded by palmettos and palm trees and live oaks. We parked and refilled our water and then changed the filter. (the water we got from Tideland was not super tasty). We had a couple of cute little cardinals at our site hopping around. For some reason, in Canada it was like they were Christmas card birds... but here they feel like little tropical parrots! super cute to see them up close...we don't have cardinals in BC.

After a quick snack, it was off to explore the beach! We had heard that we could find shark teeth here on the beach and were eager to check it out. There were SO MANY broken and worn oyster shells in huge piles on the beach. We would sit in a pile and sift through them diligently. We searched for ages and Oliver found a white shark tooth! super cool. It gave us hope we might find more, but no luck. Some other beach searchers had found a small number of black shark teeth and were impressed with Ollie's white one. 

Quite a few people fishing in the surf. We saw one guy haul in a small sting ray. We watched him unhooked it carefully and then flip it back down the beach into the water. We walked a bit further... windy but warm despite being overcast. It was quite hot when the sun peeked out. Jonathan had a quick swim in the surf, but the sand was coarse and churned up in the waves. 

After awhile, Ollie and Jonathan walked back to the rig... Ollie eager to make a necklace with his newly found treasure. Meems and I kept up our search a little longer with no luck. We headed back to the RV to make beach crafts with our shells and embroidery thread. It didn't last too long with the no-see-ums biting. 

Moved inside for crafting and bracelet making. Jonathan opted to go for a shower and Ollie and I snuck over to the shower block and hid Jonathan's bike on him as we watched from behind the side of the building. Feeling sneaky. 

Ollie and Jonathan rode bides around the campground and then to the campground store to search for milk (we were out), but the store and the gas station didn't have any. But the camp store did have some cool stickers to choose from, so they reported back in about that for us to check out together tomorrow. Meems worked hard on beach crafts ... weaving and knotting her little teeny shells and beads into her bracelets for everyone. Very pretty. 

We all went to bed "early" around 9ish after the day in the sun. Super tired, we managed one chapter of Anne of Green Gables before falling asleep. Kids are still loving Anne, which is so awesome. Not sure what we have lined up next for them yet. Will perhaps hit up another used book store or thrift shop for some ideas.